Facebook Changes Competition and Promotion Rules for Pages

Last Month I wrote a blog post on the importance of following the rules regarding Facebook Competitions and Promotions for Business Pages (see here), which involved using a third party app... this week, that has all changed.

Facebook has announced rule changes to their Promotion Guidelines which now allows Page Owners to run competitions/promotions on the wall of their business pages and do not require a paid third party app as done so previously, resulting in increased flexibility and reduced cost for business owners wishing to run competitions on their facebook business pages.

It is unsure why Facebook have decided to make this radical rule change, possibly because of the large number of users "doing it wrong" leading up to this and the enormity of monitoring those pages.

The new promotion rules (see promotion rules here) still include various regulations but are far more flexible than the previous restrictions.  All Promotions on a business page are to include official rules, terms and eligibility (e.g. age etc).  Each promotion is to include a full release of the participant and to acknowledge the fact that the promotion is no way sponsored, endorse or administered by facebook.  No assistance is available from Facebook for competitions or compliance and no responsibility will be taken for any promotion.  The only main restrictions for participants are that " share to enter" or "share on a friends timeline" type entries are not allowed.  

Advantages

• No fees involved from third party apps - next to no expense.
  
• Ease of Use for Business Owners to create a simple competition/promotion and flexibility to announce winners on the page wall.
  
• Competition will be viewable to all users if hosted on the page wall - third party apps for competitions are only viewable on computers and not on mobile or tablet devices or apps and with 80% of Facebook users accessing the social network on mobile devices, this was a real problem.
  

Disadvantages

• More chance of getting "one off" visitors to your page who aren't genuinely interested in your product.
  
• Unable to use Promotion as a "Lead Magnet" - no real contact information for participants will be available opposed to third party apps which supply a database of email addresses, names & contacts for participants.
  
• Higher chance of "poorly run" competitions and half-hearted promotions which will discourage genuine clients rather than encourage them.
  
• More chance of Spam/Rubbish Competitions on Business Pages. 
  

I still believe that there is a place for the third-party run competitions as they are professional and provide informative usable content for the business owner. I feel for the small business owners that solely managed, run and maintain competition apps as their business,  and hope that their customers will continue to use their professional services.   I look forward to seeing what businesses come up with with the change in promotion restrictions and will be sharing some of the positive & well run promotions when I come across them.

Yours in Social Media


Judi Gray
Blue Bird Internet Marketing

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