Facebook competition rules – marketers beware

Many companies and organisations invest large amounts of time, effort and capital into building a community around their brand on Facebook. The thought of losing this valuable marketing resource overnight is unthinkable for most. However, I have already spoken to quite a few businesses this year, including a couple of larger brands, who have had their Facebook pages removed permanently for flaunting competition guidelines.

In this article we identify the main culprit, show you how to avoid falling foul of Facebook Promotional Guid and suggest alternative options for running your competitions.

Like and Share… everywhere!

The main, and almost exclusive, the offender is the ‘Like and Share’ competition. If you’re even an occasional Facebook user, you’ll be familiar with these.

The competition mechanic is simple. A company will publish competition details and prize information on a post on their Facebook Wall. This will appear on their fans’ news feeds. Users are asked to like, share, and/or comment on the post using Facebook’s indigenous functionality to be in with a chance to win.

Why does this work so well? Well, for users, entry to the competition is achieved with the click of a mouse button; virtually no effort is required to be in with a chance to win. For marketers, there is a huge payoff in terms of reach. The more users that engage with their post, the better viral propagation of their competition content, Facebook page and, ultimately, their brand.

Why does Facebook not like this? Facebook considers itself as, primarily, a social platform. They want to control the demarcation line between natural, organic and user-generated content and content delivered by marketers, advertisers and businesses. When brands use prizes as an incentive for the viral sharing of their promotional content, Facebook consider this to be an unnatural propagation of low-quality content. This, in turn, has a negative impact on the overall Facebook user’s experience, pushing corporate content where organic, social content should really be appearing.

In fact, according to the guidelines, no indigenous functionality can be used as an implicit condition of entry to any competition or promotion. This isn’t limited to liking, sharing and commenting – it also includes checking-in, uploading photos to a Wall or responding to a poll/questionnaire.

So what are we to do?

According to Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines:

Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or a Page App.

Thus, one solution is to host your competition on an externally hosted application embedded into a tab on your Facebook page. As standard, most companies will capture the entrant’s name and email address so that they can be contacted in the event that they win the competition. Often the mechanic will be a multiple-choice question or something similar.

However, we usually prefer to create an opportunity to re-engage with the user as the sole competition entry mechanic. For example, we’ve previously asked competition entrants to opt-in to a subscription to a client’s e-newsletter. Another way of securing re-engagement is what’s called ‘Fan Gating’ – asking the user to like your page before he or she can enter the competition. For users, it’s a small commitment. For marketers, it’s a great way to keep the lines

Remember – you can use indigenous Facebook functionality within your Page App or an external site. Just not as a mandatory condition of competition entry.

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