Facebook’s Promotional Guidelines – The Easy Version

If you are thinking about running any sort of competiton on Facebook you will need to be aware of their Promotional Guidelines.

Despite the title, Facebook’s Promotional Guidelines are hard and fast rules laid out by Facebook and not following them could result in Facebook terminating your page and account.

Like all rules and conditions, they are written as part of Facebook’s small print on their website, so I thought I would make things easy for you and let you know the no-no’s when running a competition.

Promotions in this instance covers things like contests, competitions, sweepstakes and similar offerings.

Just a note before we dive in: I have seen plenty of pages not following these rules and plenty of social media professionals over-looking these guidelines when consulting with their clients and I haven’t yet seen any pages closed down due to breaking these guidelines.

Having said that, I do not recommend that you break any Facebook terms and conditions.

So, on to the rules. Basically, the Promotional Guidelines amount to things you cannot do, which I have listed below:

Apps Are a Must

You need to run your contest through an app – either via a specialised app or through a Page Tab. In other words, Facebook does not want you to run a competition via your wall feed.

Don’t Use Facebook Features as a Trigger

You cannot ask someone to Like your page as the sole way for them to enter your competition. One way around this is to create a “Gateway page” that forces a visitor to Like your page before they can enter the competiton.

Condition of Entry Restriction

You also cannot ask someone to like a wall post, tag themselves in a photo or any other of Facebook’s functions as a condition of entry into a contest. There are 3 exceptions to this: Liking a page, checking into a place, and connecting to your app.

No Like for Vote

You cannot tell people to Like something with the aim of this being a way for people to vote on an entry.

No Notification Through Facebook

You cannot notify winners through Facebook. This includes via messages, chat or posts. This means that you will need to collect their email address so you can contact any winners.

Copyright Restrictions

You cannot use any of Facebook’s name, logo or other copyrights or trademarks in connection with your promotion.

Includes

When running a competition on Facebook, you must include the following:

• A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant
• Acknowledgment that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook
• Disclosure that the participant is providing information to [your business name] and not to Facebook

Conclusion

To put these guidelines simply, Facebook does not want you to use their built-in functions and wall as a way to conduct any sort of contest or competition, and they want to make sure that visitors understand that they, Facebook, have nothing to do with the promotion you are running.

What do you think? Are these guidelines too strick? Or do they make sense?

Tagged as: Facebook

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