Competition on your Facebook page

 

Have you ever run a competition from your Facebook page? Chances are that you haven’t – running a third party app on a Facebook Company page didn’t appeal to a lot of companies. This reduced the amount of engagement that companies could get on their page, so Facebook has responded and changed this.

Running competitions from your Facebook Page

Facebook have kept the terms and conditions very easy to understand. From the Facebook For Business Pages

“We’ve removed the requirement that promotions on Facebook can only be administered through apps.

Now, promotions may be administered on Page Timelines and in apps on Facebook. For example, businesses can now:

• Collect entries by having users post on the Page or comment/like a Page post
• Collect entries by having users message the Page
• Utilize likes as a voting mechanism

As before, however, businesses cannot run promotions on personal Timelines.

Accurate tagging is required in promotions – here’s Facebook:

“In order to maintain the accuracy of Page content, our Pages Terms now prohibit Pages from tagging or encouraging people to tag themselves in content that they are not actually depicted in. So, for instance:

• It’s OK to ask people to submit names of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize
• It’s not OK to ask people tag themselves in pictures of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize

We hope these updates will enable more businesses to use Facebook to launch their promotions. For more information regarding the changes to our promotions policies, check out our downloadable Promotion Guidelines, which include FAQs and best practices for running promotions through Facebook.”

Facebook Competitions

Great ideas for a Facebook page competition

• Share information in a comment – name a new product, comment on an article, answer a question
• Post a picture comment – ask users to post pictures in their comments for entry.
• Make the competition compelling so that people want to enter and spread the word.

Facebook Competitions – The Don’ts

There are still rules on the running and management of Facebook competitions. From the Facebook Promotional Guidelines

“Q: Why can’t I ask people to take part in a promotion by liking, sharing, or posting something on their personal Timeline?
We want to make sure that people continue to post authentic, high quality content to their Facebook Timelines to stay better connected with the people they care about. There are technical reasons for the administration of the promotion to be via either a Page or in an app. For example, because people can choose to limit the visibility of the content they put on Facebook to only themselves, friends, or to a custom group of people, pages won’t have the ability to access all of the entries that people post on their own Timelines unless these entries are public. We may explore enabling this in the future, but to ensure a good experience for administrators of promotions and prospective entrants to a promotion, we are limiting the administration of promotions on Facebook to Pages and within apps at this time.”

So keep the competition entries to your own page – sharing can be encouraged, but not as a method of entering the competition.

Facebook Competition Apps

The competition apps are still there and offer choices that are not available within the new Facebook Competition rules (collection of data, etc) It is up to you as a business to decide which option is better for their requirements.
Will these new rules make you more likely to run a Facebook Competition? Would you like help running a Facebook Competition?