You must be a fan to enter!

January 5, 2010
Posted by joshuamarch

After Facebook updated their competition and promotion guidelines towards the end of last year, there was a lot of confusion surrounding the ability to require users to be fans of a fan page before they could enter a competition. The guidelines weren’t clear, and seemed to suggest that you could restrict users from entering the competition if they weren’t fans, as long as you didn’t require them to be fans as an entry condition (so you could limit the entry page to fans, but couldn’t actually say ‘you must be a fan to enter’). This was inconsistent and confusing for clients, and the Facebook team themselves.
Luckily, this has now been amended - on the 22nd December they updated the guidelines to read (emphasis ours):

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.  You may, however, condition entry to the promotion upon becoming a fan of a Page.

This will make things much simpler and avoid the verbal wrangling that was going on before Christmas!

The iPlatform Competition Platform allows us to quickly launch fully branded text, photo and video competitions with voting, leaderboards and full fan page integration. Get in touch to find out more.