New Facebook Competition Guidelines - What You Need to Know

Surprisingly Facebook have changed their competition rules to 'make it easier for businesses of all sizes to create and administer promotions on Facebook'. We give you a overview of what you need to know...

The Key Change

• You no longer need to run a competition on an external app (such as Easypromos), you can now use your brand page

You Can...

• Still use apps to make competitions look great and to enable them to be housed in one place perhaps under a 'Competitions' tab for easy viewing by users

You Cannot...

• Use people's personal Timelines to encourage entry (i.e. 'share on your Timeline to enter') - the competition must be entered on your brand page
• Ask people to tag themselves in your content so you cannot use tagging in of pictures or comments as an entry mechanism

Competition Examples

• Facebookers enter by posting on your brand page (comments or images)

'Upload a photo of you using our product and our favourite will win!'

• Facebookers enter by commenting on a page post

'Name our latest product'

• Facebookers enter by liking a page post

'Like your favourite photo in our album'

• Facebookers enter by direct messaging the page

• Facebookers use likes as a voting mechanism to enter

Remember...

• You are still responsible for the official rules and terms and conditions and for acknowledging that Facebook is not associated with your competition
• You still need to think able to frequency of competitions - although it's much easier to run them now, there's still no point posting hundreds of competitions every month. You'll find you won't get genuine brand advocates liking your page but 'competition hunters' hindering your engagement rates
• Running a competition on an app may give you better insights into the user which the new-style of competition may not give - email addresses and personal information for example

It's exciting Facebook have changed the rules but as a user of Facebook, I'm hoping my Newsfeed is not going to be filled with lots of brands running random, unrelated competitions now! This change may see many users unliking brands to prevent this happening. We would say to remember your objectives of the competition and base your entry mechanism on those objectives - and never forget about engagement rates being the key to success!

Read Facebook's full Page Terms here 

Jane x