Woh Hup Food Facebook Campaign is a campaign you shouldn't follow

(Thanks to Daphne Maia for posting this on her Instagram which inspired this post.)

So you are tasked to do a Facebook campaign with lots of advertising budget to buy media space. What do you do?

Definitely not how Woh Hup Food does it.

Source: From Daphne Maia Instagram.

Woh Hup Food had the budget to print rail hangers and to hang it on MRT trains. This would cost such a substantial sum of money. Unfortunately, the mechanics of the campaign wasn't well thought through that it has lead to problems for both customers and, I believe, for Woh Hup Food marketing team too. 

First of all, this Facebook campaign highlights the lack of understanding of Facebook and how Facebook works on mobile devices. 

Running such a campaign runs a foul of Facebook guidelines on promotions.

From Facebook.

iii.    You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app. For example, you must not condition registration or entry upon the user liking a Wall post, or commenting or uploading a photo on a Wall.

iv.    You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.

All it takes is a few angry customers to place a complain to Facebook and the Page will be banned. There goes the ROI on the advertising budget. 

Another problem with this campaign is the mechanics as it confuses the audience. 

Take a look at Woh Hup Food Facebook here and you see Facebook users putting "I Love WH" basically every where on the Page. "I love WH" can be found on recommendations, at almost every recent post about the contest and I believe users also have sent messages to the Page admin to say "I Love WH".

No wonder one of the post said the contest is "overwhelming". "Overwhelming" for the marketing I bet as they have to go through individual profiles to check if the entry was done right. 

Besides being messy, this campaign does not allow for data collection. Data is important for any marketer and this campaign only allow the marketing team to collect the name of the users. Collecting the name is also an issue as it means the marketing intern would have to copy from Facebook and paste it into an excel sheet. Tedious and unproductive. 

There are several ways to overcome this. If you are looking at a more affordable option, you could use websites, like OfferPop.com, that helps social marketers to run Facebook contests on their Pages. There is even option to make entering an email a requirement for entering the contest. All you need to is sign up, link your page to the OfferPop app and when you run a contest, just pin the post to the top. Each campaign can be bought for USD10. 

If you have a bigger budget, you could consider do a mobile site for the contest. Use Facebook Connect to get users to use Facebook to register and Facebook Open Graph so that "I love WH" appears on the friends' newsfeed without violating Facebook's terms and conditions.

Part of the advertising medium budget should also be used to advertise the contest on Facebook. I strongly recommend Sponsored Posts as it appears in the newsfeed especially on Facebook mobile app. 

Spending like $10,000 or more to hand something on a train's rail and getting just 415 Likes, as of the time publishing this post, is not really "overwhelming" results.