The iPlatform delivers marketing campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in reaching and increasingly part of the population who spend time in the social networking website, get in touch now.

With its 24.3m users, the UK is still leading – with an impressive 40% of the population on Facebook. In comparison, Turkey, France and Germany have rates of 26.3%, 24.3%, 8.1%.

These numbers show once again how relevant the Facebook platform can be for marketing campaigns that wish to reach a growing part of these countries’ population. If you want to find out how we can help you deliver successful marketing campaigns on Facebook, get in touch now.

Facebook has now allowed advertisers to target ads to the friends of their connections. Up until now, they could only target their own connections, which means exclusively the actual fans of their Pages, users of their Applications, members of their Groups and attendees of their Events.

With the new targeting, friends of these connections  who see the ads will receive them with a message saying which of their friends is a fan of that page, for example.

You can even use the targeting for URLs outside Facebook, which could become a powerful way of driving traffic.

If you want to find out more about marketing in Facebook, get in touch now.

With the new rules, it is now not acceptable to use the Facebook features to directly engage in such promotions, and instead they must use a third party application to run the competition (which can be a stand alone application, or an application running inside a fan page), and contact the winners directly, for example by collecting their email address, rather than through the Facebook messages or newsfeeds.

What To Do and Not To Do

Here are the examples given by Facebook on how the new guidelines will impact promotions.

You cannot: Condition entry in the promotion upon a user providing content on Facebook, such as making a post on a profile or Page, status comment or photo upload.

You can: Use a third party application to condition entry to the promotion upon a user providing content. For example, you may administer a photo contest whereby a user uploads a photo through a third-party application to enter the contest.

You cannot: Administer a promotion that users automatically enter by becoming a fan of your Page.

You can: Only allow fans of your Page to access the tab that contains the third-party application for the promotion.

You cannot: Notify winners through Facebook, such as through Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles or Pages.

You can: Collect an address or email through the third-party application for the promotion in order to contact the winner by email or standard mail.

Almost even more important than all of these though – Facebook now need all promotions to be approved by a Facebook account manager seven days before they launch! So if you want to launch a promotion, you need to be in touch with your local Facebook sales office, or have developers with contacts there.

At iPlatform, we have a competition platform that allows us to quickly set up and launch both simple prize draws and sweepstakes, or full UGC competitions with media upload, user voting, comments in leaderboards, in short time periods with proven and effective methods. It’s in use by multiple major agencies and blue chip brands for running competitions on Facebook  – we’re launching over five full UGC competitions this month. If you want to find out more about how we can help you run competitions on Facebook, get in touch now. We have a good relationship with the Facebook teams in both UK and international and will ensure your promotions are approved.