One of the best ways to gain “likes”/potential customers on Facebook is by running a competition. I’ve spoken before about the strict rules Facebook has for just about everything, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are Facebook competition rules too!
There is however some good news here. As of the 27th August 2013, the Facebook competition rules changed! This means it easier to run them than before (hooray!), so read on to find out more.
What you CANT do under Facebook competition rules:
Under Facebook competition rules, you are not allowed to enable a user to enter your competition by:
- tagging themselves in a photo on your page.
- sharing the promotion on their timeline, or their friend’s timeline.
What you CAN do under Facebook competition rules:
Under Facebook competition rules, you can use the following to enter people into a competition:
- liking a status or photo.
- commenting on a status or photo.
- messaging you via your page.
- writing on your page wall (this can be with a specific thing IE: suggesting a new name for a product).
- liking your page.
- checking in to your page.
What you must do
As well as running your promotion in line with the Facebook competition rules, there are a number of things you must mention.
- A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant.
- Acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.
- Disclosure that the participant is providing information to you, and not to Facebook.
Can you run a competition through Facebook any other way?
There are other ways of running competitions through Facebook, which have their own pros.
One is to run it on your website and direct people to it via Facebook. This can be done through something like Google Forms on a “static site. If you run a WordPress powered site/blog, there are a lot of plugins you can choose from. A pro to running it this way is that you will be able to collect email addresses of entrants, meaning you can notify these people in future of new products and other competitions (but make sure you mention this when they enter!).
If you don’t want people to leave your Facebook page, then you can use an external app. I’ve seen quite a few different ones, and the best I have found so far is Rafflecopter. It’s easy to set up, has multiple options of how to run your competition and how your customers can enter. It is external to Facebook, although your user doesn’t have to leave your page to enter. It also has the required release information already on it.
Notifying your competition Winner(s)
Before the Facebook competition rules change, you weren’t allowed to notify your winner(s) through Facebook. These rules have been removed from the page guidelines HOWEVER it is still worth considering gathering email address as part of your competition. This is because often when you send a message to someone on Facebook that you are not friends with, it will go into their “other” box, and they will not see it. The same applies to commenting on a post – if there are a lot of people commenting, and you post the winner’s name on that thread, they may not see it.
The Facebook competition rules, and everything else to do with what you can and can’t do on Facebook pages can be found on Facebook’s page guidelines.
Have you had a great success with running a competition on Facebook?
Or have you come across any great apps for running competitions on Facebook?
Please let me know in the comments below!
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