Facebook has announced new guidelines to “govern the publicizing or administering of any sweepstakes, contest, competition or other similar offerings” on the social networking website.
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.
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