Facebook recently made a big change in regards to their Promotion Guidelines. You can read it in detail here but some of the highlights are as follows:
- They have removed the requirement that you need to administer any contest or promotions on Facebook by using an app.
This now means you CAN run a contest on Facebook on your Page timeline but NOT in any personal timelines.
- You can use Facebook Profiles as a means to identify your contest entrants.
This was a main reason you needed an app before – they would collect name and emails for you.
- The changes also mean you can have people enter a contest by way of liking or commenting on a page post.
This means those simple “Like this pic and be entered in the draw” spur of the moments contests on Facebook are okay to do.
- You cannot have any of this done on someones Personal timeline, however. It has to all be on your Facebook Business Page.
This means you cannot ask people to share the post on their timeline as a way to enter.
The other big change in this is that Facebook has also noted that they “prohibit Pages from tagging or encouraging people to tag themselves in content that they are not actually depicted in”. This one is kind of new.
It means you can ask people to come up with a caption for a picture and post it as a comment or a post on your page, but you cannot ask them to tag themselves in a picture that has their caption entry in it.
Now… many of you know that a lot of people and businesses have been doing contests on Facebook without following these rules anyhow. I do think there are times that having some of these quick contests is fine… but honestly, for the majority of the contests, if you are serious about running one with a goal of more than just giving away something, then I recommend you continue to use (or start) to use a Contest App that works on Facebook. Why?
A contest is more than just getting likes and comments. Many goals of doing these on Facebook also support building your email list and names to connect with.
When you don’t use one of these contest apps, the only name and email information you collect from applicants is from Facebook – you cannot email them, you cannot import them into your email marketing system, you cannot use your system to nurture and build a relationship with them outside of Facebook. Using these apps also means you can require someone to Like your page as part of the entry. They can also help build actual Likes connected to the page as opposed to simply building Likes on a status update on the Page.
I’m still delving into this to determine if there are any other issues to consider…so stay tuned to my Blog for further updates.
My recommendation for you to consider?
For quick and dirty contests like “Click Like and be entered to win a free ebook – today only” – just do it.
But if you plan to give a prize of value and do more than a few likes, look to an app like Heyo or Rafflecopter. Do your contest properly in a way that will not only build the Page likes but help you build your email list too.
(Also, don’t forget you shold always check your local or state laws as to what you are or not permitted to do for contests.)
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