Summary: Facebook recently changed the rules for brand advertisers running contests through Facebook.
Late last week, Facebook quietly made an update to their “Promotions Guidelines” that places some limits on how and where marketers and advertisers can run their own contests on Facebook. While these changes make sense (from Facebook’s perspective, at least) they will no doubt limit some of the freedom that Facebook Page admins and marketers have enjoyed to build contests and incentives for people to become fans.
Among the changes, which are fully detailed on Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines site, these are of particular interest:
“You may not administer any promotion through Facebook, except that you may administer a promotion through the Facebook Platform with our prior written approval. Such written approval may be obtained only through an account representative at Facebook.”
Basically, if you want to run a promotion you need written approval from a Facebook representative. Advertisers like agencies or larger brands have direct contact with Facebook representatives, but the majority of people who have administer a Facebook page do not. And, from first-hand experience, Facebook reps are not the most responsive group. Typically it takes 3-4 days before receiving a reply, even through their VIP email support.
“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.”
Typically, the reason you’d run a promotion on Facebook would be to entice people to become a fan of your page. With this rule in place, you couldn’t place a condition on becoming a fan as part of the eligibility to win.
There are plenty of other points of concern in the new promotions guidelines, these are just two that really stood out as obstacles to running effective Facebook contests.
Hopefully Facebook will listen to feedback from advertisers and adjust these new guidelines accordingly, or at least clarify some of the points. At the very least, Facebook needs to improve the turn around time for requests for assistance through their VIP Page Support so that requests for approvals don’t take weeks.
How will these new guidelines impact your own Facebook contests and marketing campaigns?
