Facebook Revises Promotional Guidelines
Will the new promotions guidelines change the way businesses use Facebook?
Everyday more and more brands are popping up on Facebook as a way to engage their fans, but most find that simply updating a status on a business fan page from time to time may not be enough to make an impact with their online community. Because of this, many companies have opted to use these pages as a place to run contests and have seen some very positive results. Businesses find that contests are perfect for Facebook because they get fans involved and interacting with the page, and are easy to conduct and essentially free of costs. A few of the benefits of running Facebook contests include: link building, increased traffic, marketing list creation, brand awareness, user-generated content and social media buzz.
Facebook has obviously seen the value in running contests, and now wants businesses to begin paying for the applications to run them. Facebook has been posting increasingly specific guidelines throughout the past year detailing just what is and what isn’t allowed, giving them more control of how contests are facilitated on fan pages. In early November, the social networking giant posted a new set of promotional guidelines for brands, advertisers and marketers that go into much more detail. There are a lot of don’ts on this list – including things that were previously common practice to build fans and get people talking about your brand.
Here is an overview of the new guidelines:
The Basics
-You can’t ask someone to create Facebook content to enter (unless it’s through a third party application, such as Involver)
-You must have express written permission from Facebook to put on any contest
-Facebook has laid out specific industries and geographies that cannot be included – and no one under 18 can be eligible
What’s Not Allowed
-Status update contests (where someone enters by updating their status)
-Photo upload contests (where someone enters by uploading a photo)
-Become a Fan contests (where someone is automatically entered by becoming a fan of the page)
-Any kind of contest that requires commenting on or responding to items in the News Feed
-Anything that requires purchase of a product or “completion of a lengthy task”
-Contests engaging those under the age of 18
Read the full set of promotional guidelines
In response to the promotional guidelines, Facebook Expert, Justin Smith says, “By requiring all promotions to occur within applications of some kind, Facebook is both keeping the News Feed cleaner and signaling to the tools community that it wants them heavily involved in the future of marketing on Facebook.”