Facebook Rules for Company Pages

 

Everyone loves a competition.  Just check the Twitter timelines every Friday when Tetley Tea tweets are RTd all day in the hope of winning a year’s supply of tea.  These type of competitions are easy to run and administrate, but what about Facebook competitions, why not try them?
Basically, because it can be fraught with difficulty.  Facebook wants you to attract new viewers to your page by you offering good content, not a year’s supply of goodies.  There are a lot of rules in place, and a serious infraction can mean you lose your page.

The Rules Regarding Facebook Competitions

• Basically the rules are you cannot run any sort of competition on Facebook AT ALL. So these kind of promotions are all out:
• Share  – a share of a picture, update or link cannot be an entry
• Photo / Video Upload – It’s a great type of user-generated content, but it cannot be a competition entry
• Comment – Facebook wants users to comment because they want to; not because they have to
• Invitations – Again, an organic recommendation to Like is preferred rather than one that can encourage spammimg
• Questions – It’s the classic competition entry, but not on Facebook.
• Likes – Whether it’s a status, picture or a video, you can’t gauge winners by the amount of thumbs up beside it; or by encouraging them.

So what can you do on Facebook?

You can still use Facebook to tell people about your competition and to keep people informed.   Facebook didn’t want the site to become one giant competition hook, so set in place Facebook guidelines to stop it.  We’ve all seen companies bend the rules a little, but there are companies that have lost their pages over this.
Where do you run your company promotions and competitions?