Most companies realise that Facebook is an invaluable advertising tool. With a growing need to increase brand awareness and product knowledge among consumers, many businesses have found Facebook competitions advantageous from an internet marketing perspective. Facebook competitions engage your page’s ‘fans’, while raising their awareness of company products and services.
Ricorocks decided to take a look at what is ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ when it comes to running a competition on Facebook, according to their terms and conditions.
In simple terms…
- You can use the ‘like’ mechanism – You can encourage followers of your page to ‘like’ your post as a way of entering the competition. ‘Likes’ are public and so once all entrants hit ‘Like’, you are able to select a winner at random.
- You can’t ask users to share posts – In contrast to ‘Likes’, you cannot see all users that have shared your post. If people ‘Share’ a post on their timeline, but have high privacy settings on their account, the manager of the competition is unable to see this share.
- You can use comments – You can get participants to enter by either requiring them to ‘comment’ on your post, or getting them to send your business a direct message. Once you receive the comments/messages, you can fairly choose a winner as all comments will be shown, and their senders.
- You can’t use tags – Facebook prohibits a competition, which asks users to tag themselves in one of the business’ photos if the user is not featured in the photo.
With all competitions on Facebook, you are required to include a ‘complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant’ statement along with a disclaimer stating that your competition is ‘in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with Facebook’. These can easily be added to your competition rules post. To keep up to date with current terms and conditions, visit Facebook Business News here.