Network Your Way to a Free Great Britain Trip Via Facebook: Winning Strategies

Travel enthusiasts have the opportunity to compete for a trip to Great Britain through March 13. The contest, sponsored by Facebook and VisitBritain, asks users to "unite the invite." Each participant will be given a Facebook photo, presumably that of a stranger, and will distribute it to friends who will distribute it to friends until someone can identify the photo subject and relay that information to the contest entrant. The contest entrants are paired so the mystery Facebook user you seek will also be looking for you.
Unite the invite is like the party ice breaker game where two guests are given matching puzzle pieces and have to find each other. The biggest difference is that there are potentially 500 million people at Facebook's party. Finding one face among 500 million could prove to be quite a challenge.

Math whizzes trying to calculate the difficulty of the match-up task might note that the average Facebook user has 130 friends. How many friends each friend has in common with the contest entrant complicates the math process as does the inability to predict whether friends of friends of friends will attend to the photo identification task. Like a chain mail, your request could get stalled or ignored altogether anywhere in the process.

The trip winner is the pair who completes the task most quickly (not the ones who complete it first, as different participants will sign up at different times throughout the race.) Each member of the pair will win a trip for two to Great Britain, choosing one of 6 cities.

Supplemental, unofficial prizes include a potential Facebook friend for life or perhaps a multitude of Facebook friends who facilitated the victory.

David Rowell publisher of the Travel Insider newsletter, offers strategic tips for travel enthusiasts eager to win the Great Britain trip. He suggests that contest entrants message all of their Facebook contacts before signing up to participate and let them know when the contestant will post his assigned mystery photo.

Another obvious strategy is to boost your friend network now. There are downsides to unmanageably large friend networks on Facebook, but if you want to win this travel contest, they may be worth enduring. The more friends you have, the faster your mystery photo will spread through the social network. Why not adopt an extra 200 or 1000 friends in anticipation of the contest start?

Once the contest is underway, the key to winning is speed. Setting aside time to network, sending out reminders, posting and chatting may be the most effective course of action when it comes to identifying your travel buddy and beating out the competition for Facebook's Great Britain trip.