New Guidelines Make Facebook Promotions Easier for Brands

A while back, we shared these guidelines for running an effective contest on Facebook. As digital is ever-changing with new developments and trends, there have been some recent changes to Facebook’s promotion guidelines that make it easier for brands to deploy promotions and contests.

What’s new?

Back in the day, if brands wanted to run a contest on Facebook, they were required to spend thousands of dollars in advertising to support the contest. Facebook later removed that requirement but did maintain the guideline that if a brand wanted to give away any sort of prize, even as small as a $10 gift card, the contest needed to be deployed via a Facebook application. These applications required either a third-party developer or sufficient internal resources to build a Facebook Canvas Page with HTML, JavaScript and CSS. That’s a lot of resources for a little giveaway! In addition to this requirement, Facebook prohibited brands from requiring Facebook actions such as a comment or Like on a Page, photo or post as a form of entry into the contest.

But that was all the past. Facebook has revised its Page Terms, removing the requirement that promotions can only be administered through apps. Now, promotions can be deployed via an application or on a Facebook Page timeline. With the ability to use Facebook Page Timelines to run a contest, brands can now collect entries in the following ways:

• Have a consumer post on the Page or comment/Like a Page post


• Have a consumer send a message to the Page


• Have consumers “Like” photos or posts as a way to vote in a contest

Another change with the new Page Terms is that Pages cannot encourage consumers to tag themselves in content that they are not actually depicted in. Meaning that brands cannot ask consumers to tag themselves in a picture in exchange for entry into a contest. This prevents brands from forcing consumers to mass tag a photo that is not relevant to that consumer’s actual Facebook activity. For example, requiring a consumer to tag themselves in a photo of an energy drink, even though the photo is not relevant to their actual personal life.)

What does this mean for brands?

Simply put, brands don’t need to allocate tons of resources to developing elaborate applications if they want to leverage their social community to deploy a contest. A contest can be up and running as quickly as they can send out a Facebook post.

Also, because the mechanisms for entry (posting on a Page and commenting/Liking a Page post) create organic stories within the Facebook newsfeed, brands can count on their promotions to spread to those who aren’t already connected to their Facebook Page. This is great news for marketers who are trying to watch their marketing budgets, as they can increase reach without spending a lot of (or any) money on advertising.

There are still some practical considerations to keep in mind when deploying a Facebook contest, even if the process has become more reasonable for brands. Primarily, marketers still need to allocate resources to comb through contest entries. While many social conversation aggregators will pull in posts on a brand’s Facebook Page, these aggregators do come at a cost, both from a monetary standpoint as well as human capital (in order to build out the queries to obtain the data). And when a brand uses Page post Likes, comments and Page messages as a form of entry, they need to ensure they have resources to manually record all of the entries in order to select a winner, as this data is not as easily aggregated.

Overall, this is a huge development for brands that are active on Facebook. As with any marketing initiative, proper planning is vital in order to ensure that the promotion has both a purpose and sufficient resources in order to make it successful.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/facebook/new-guidelines-make-facebook-promotions-easier-brands-0694387?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-guidelines-make-facebook-promotions-easier-brands