Why Running Online Challenges on Facebook is Hurting Your Business

Online challenges are a very popular way for creators to collect new leads and grow their audience base. 

An online challenge is a type of shorter online course (generally 5-30 calendar days) where participants are given daily tasks to complete with the goal of reaching a set result by the end of the challenge.

If you are an online course creator, you should definitely consider running an online challenge, as it can be extremely beneficial for your business. In fact, online challenge courses are great at boosting engagement levels, generating a feeling of community among participants, and even upselling your more expensive product offerings.

Learn all about online challenges and their benefits: Introducing Challenges in Heights Platform (How to Increase Engagement and Boost Online Course Sales)

So if done right, challenges can really help your online course business or online coaching business grow.

Up until now, there hasn't been a definitive tool to help creators build and sell online challenges. So many creators had to make do with what was available: social media.

Facebook has become one of the most popular places for creators to host online challenges.

There are benefits of using Facebook to run online challenges since it is free and familiar to many. However, there are also many disadvantages that creators should be aware of because Facebook isn't designed to offer any specific functionality for creating challenges.

Heights Platform is one of, if not the only tool with a dedicated online challenge creation feature that allows creators to easily build and run online challenges, eliminating all the hassles related to uploading content, releasing it at a set time, notifying participants, upselling other services and so on.

One of the hardest parts of managing an online challenge is to relaunch it again after it is complete. With Heights Platform, you can also re-run the same online challenge over and over again, simply by clicking a button!

Why You Should Not Run Online Challenges on Facebook

Facebook is not the ideal place for creators to run online challenges. While you can find more clients through Facebook, and increase your visibility, there are also a few major disadvantages to running challenges in this platform.

Online challenges are supposed to help you collect more leads and upsell your more expressive products, and you should use a tool that allows you to do just that.

Let's go over the major downsides to choosing Facebook for online challenges:

#1. Lots of Distractions

The majority of people visit Facebook to connect with friends and access entertaining content. There are almost 3 billion people on Facebook today.

So while Facebook can help your reach your target audience, it does not help you to retain them.

There are so many distractions that could drive away leads from your Facebook group or challenge. Even if Facebook helps you get participants in your challenges, it will be hard to keep them entertained and have them stick around for long if you host your challenge in the same social network.

You are also at the mercy of Facebook's algorithms. Facebook might decide at any time not to show content you post to your audience in their news feed, and as a creator, if your audience is only on Facebook, you are at their mercy when it comes to whether your posts will get exposure or not.

Further, Facebook isn't built for helping your audience learn. It is built to keep them entertained.

#2. Harder to Upsell Your Main Products

The main goal of online challenges is to help you collect new leads and introduce prospects to your other, more expensive products.

So you need a tool specifically designed to upsell services within the challenge. While on Facebook you could manually tell people to check out your other products and try to direct them to your website, it is not as effective as having a dedicated upsell page with check-out, where your audience is already on your website in the first place.

Heights Platform lets you easily add upsells to your online challenges, generate a special price for the challenge participants, create beautiful upsell pages to help you drive up sales.

#3. Harder to Recognize Your Brand

The benefit of running online challenges on your own website is that people get familiar with your brand much easier.

If you use Heights Platform to host your online courses, membership sites or coaching program, you can run online challenges on the same site. This can help prospects familiarize themselves with your brand, understand how your site works, see what other products you offer, read all the positive reviews left by previous students and so on...

There is a great advantage to running online challenges on your own site versus using a separate Facebook page, and it can make a huge difference in your conversion rate and students' experience.

When you have your audience on your own platform, it really is "your audience". The audience you have on Facebook is "borrowed" in the sense that you are at the mercy of Facebook reducing the exposure of your content to them, and the impact that your brand can make.

#4. Hard Work and Manual Hassle

If all of the disadvantages listed above are not enough to convince you that Facebook is not the ideal place to run online challenges, consider the amount of manual work needed to create a challenge this way.

If you already ran a Facebook challenge in the past, you know that it is a huge hassle to make it work.

First of all, you need to create all the content of the challenge. Then you need to manually upload it on Facebook, manually notify participants about the new content and release new lesson posts every day.

That is a lot of work. On top of this, you still have to promote your challenge and deal with customer service. (It is going to be very hard to understand where a specific member of your audience is at in their progress or what they have seen so far that they might need help with as none of that information is going to be visible to you on Facebook!)

On Heights Platform, uploading content to create challenge lessons is extremely easy. Heights Platform also lets you schedule automated emails that will be sent to all students enrolled in the challenge once a new lesson is live. You can set the lesson release date so you do not have to release them manually every day, and you can also set the lesson's expiration date to incentivize your audience members to go through the lesson before it disappears!

Once a challenge is completed, you also have the option to re-run the same challenge with a click of a button. You can decide the launch date for the new challenge, and the system automatically calculates the launch and expiration dates of every single lesson, and reschedules your emails, based on the settings you had in the previous challenge!

What Should You Do Instead? How to Run Online Challenges Seamlessly:

Facebook is a great place to connect with people, attract your ideal customers and introduce them to your brand.

Once you have found your target audience on social media, it's time to bring them over to your website so that you can better serve them, and so that you have a better chance of them buying from you in the future.

So how do you build an online challenge without using Facebook?

We wrote an article explaining step by step how you can create an online challenge that actually works: How to Launch an Online Challenge in 5 Easy Steps

By now, you probably see that Heights Platform is the ideal software to use for running online challenges.

If your goal is to collect new leads, boost your sales, increase student engagement or promote your course and coaching products, Heights Platform's Challenges are perfect for you!