Running a promotion or competition is a easy way to gain new followers and generate a little bit of buzz around your page. When run correctly, a promotion will encourage large amounts of engagement and interaction, and should generate a lot of viral attention throughout your fan’s newsfeed and timeline. If your fans are sharing and posting about your page or competition, the number of fans on your page will grow exponentially.
Often Facebook Pages which are self-managed (or not run by Digital Marketing Professionals) run promotions which contravene the terms and conditions agreed when creating a Page.
The Facebook Pages Guidelines leave the responsibility for compliance with local regulations and laws with you, the page owner. It is essential you also follow Facebook’s terms and conditions. Facebook has recently been clamping down on users who break these rules, particularly those who use the Like, Share or Tag functionality as the primary method of competition entry.
The first requirement, often overlooked by most admins, is that all promotions be administered within an App, either a Canvas or Page tab. This rules out the basic “share this photo” or “like this page” to enter (Facebook specifically bans users from using these Facebook functions as the primary way for a user to enter a competition).
Secondly, you must not notify winners directly through Facebook, for example through Facebook messages, chat, or posts. Unfortunately, both these rules do complicate the competition process for admins.
So how do you effectively run a promotion in line with the Facebook terms and conditions?
Firstly, any competition you run, needs to be delivered through a App or Tab. These are accessed from the top of your Page Timeline, where you can have up to four displayed on page-load.
Our next recommendation is to setup a “Like-wall”, so that people can only enter your competition if they Like your Page. As the Like mechanism is not the primary way to enter the competition, this complies with Facebook’s rules.
Finally, you need a mechanism for people to enter the competition, and one that also collects some form of personal information (eg. an email address) so that you can contact the winner outside of Facebook. The simplest way is a basic contact form, as this allows you to specify the information you wish to collect. We recommend running the contact form through an email marketing program such as Mailchimp. This way you can easily collect the data necessary (and Mailchimp doing the ‘heavy lifting’), with the secondary benefit of having your users entered automatically into an email marketing list. Mailchimp requires a two-step verification process, so people are only entered into the competition (added to your list) when the user opens and verifies the email. This means the user will find your email out of the junk mail, and by opening it, most junk mail filters will assume it is a safe sender, greatly increasing your open rates for future marketing.
You must also provide a Terms and Conditions of the competition. This should include information regarding what you will use collected personal data for and disclosure that the participant is providing information to your organisation and not to Facebook, a complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant, and acknowledgment that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by or associated with Facebook.
Pixelwork have developed an app for clients to run promotions and competitions. It can be seen in-use regularly on the Wesley Health Facebook, Refinery Magazine Facebook and others. If there are no promotions being run on these pages at your time of viewing, please feel free to contact us for a demo and to discuss how we can customise a promotion or competition tab to effectively grow your business page.
While we have discussed the legal requirements of running a competition on Facebook, but before you start a promotion you must first plan the purpose or desired outcomes of running a competition. Do you want to grow your fan page, or do you want to promote a new product or service? Once you have figured out your purpose, what will you give away? Will the prize be of value or interest to your actual customers? Most importantly, will the new fans you ‘acquire’ be potential leads for your business, or are they only interested in the prize? These choices will determine whether the promotion is a success for your business – which is the whole purpose of having a business Page in the first place.
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