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Marketers and Agencies Figuring Out How to Navigate Facebook’s New Contest Rules
November 30th, 2009
| By Justin Smith | 24 Comments » |
Three weeks ago, Facebook announced significant updates to its promo/sweepstakes policies for Facebook Pages that have very practical impact for marketers on Facebook. For a deeper dive on the rule changes, see our analysis. But essentially, the new rules:
- Require all marketers to get explicit permission from Facebook at least 7 days before administering any promotion inside Facebook.
- Prohibit running any contests or promotions that require users to become a fan, interact with a feed story, or do anything else outside an application tab or canvas page in order to enter.
This means that “become a fan” contests, “status update” contests, “photo upload” contests, and any other kind of contest that requires commenting on or responding to items in the News Feed are no longer allowed. Rather, Pages must send users to a custom application tab to enter contests. This is good news for companies building Facebook Page tools for marketers.
Now, agencies and marketers are trying to understand whether these policies are being actively enforced, as many businesses and organizations have been experimenting with different types of contests to drive traffic and engagement on their Facebook Page over recent months, and several promotions that seem to violate the policies have continued to appear lately.
For example, a few weeks ago, an Ikea store in Sweden ran a promotion on their Facebook Page in which users who tagged photos of furniture with their names first won the items as prizes. A Facebook spokesperson told us today that the promotion was indeed in violation of the new policies and would not be allowed to run today.
And last week, Gillette, one of the biggest brands in the US, announced a promotion on its Facebook Page, saying, “Become a fan today and you’ll be entered to win a free Fusion MVP,” a clear violation of the new policies. Gilette is also redirecting members from a sweepstakes tab to a signup form on Gillette.com to enter the contest, but the status update still exists on its Page, and is confusing to multiple marketers we’ve heard from. A Facebook spokesperson said he was not able to comment on individual campaigns beyond the Ikea case when we asked earlier today.
However, Facebook did share this statement about the new rules:
“Page administrators should read the guidelines before hosting any contests on their Page. We created the policy to help ensure a consistent experience on Facebook and ensure that eligible Page owners had the information they needed in order to host contests on their site.”
For now, it seems like many marketers aren’t yet aware that Facebook has updated its contest policies, and Facebook is not being as aggressive in policing Page contests as they are on Facebook Platform policy violations, likely because they’re still helping many advertisers figure out the new rules.
Because of this, we expect the confusion to continue. We advise Page managers to abide by the new policies as they plan campaigns. We also expect to see many cases of Facebook making marketers change their contests after launch.
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November 30th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Ok so can you explain this to us…Is what this fan page is doing illegal…also how do we contact facebook, they don’t have a number and the email script filled a few out and no response..
City of Sacramento
http://www.facebook.com/cityofsacramento
November 30th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Mike- Yes, what that Page is doing is in violation of Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines. The Page is unofficial anyway and can be shut down anytime by Facebook.
November 30th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Pretty cool. Check out this interesting idea that just launched for any facebook vanity web address. Top 10 lists and tons of categories. Interesting niche.
December 1st, 2009 at 12:33 am
Facebook fan pages are miss used continuously.
Now let see what happened after content policy updated.
December 1st, 2009 at 1:09 am
Thanks for the notification.
“get explicit permission from Facebook” sounds a little bit difficult. No eMail, no fax, no phonenumber … how we can get in contact with FB ?
December 1st, 2009 at 4:32 am
Hi, Dave – Why is the City of Sacramento page unofficial? How can you tell?
December 1st, 2009 at 5:25 am
The reason why facebook won’t allow contests that force people to become fans is that the live feed notifies users when one of their friends becomes a fan of something.
Maybe they could get around that limitation by creating a new “become a fan” button that does not notify your friends when you click it.
December 1st, 2009 at 6:08 am
Good and important article, Justin. I didn’t know about the new rules, and that had IKEA run their ingenious (wasn’t it?) campaign now, they would’ve been in violation.
December 1st, 2009 at 8:24 am
I think this just squeezes the little guy (business). We have been using facebook to help the little guy gain market coverage via the platform, now we have to run promos from these companies like wildfire who charge almost 10 times as much as we do to do the same thing… We are just trying to help the economy out by using coupons, promos, we never once say join our fan page we just give away free stuff to people who are our fans is that a crime?
December 1st, 2009 at 8:37 am
[...] Fonte: Inside Facebook [...]
December 1st, 2009 at 9:09 am
Hi Justin,
I’ve heard that giveaways that are available to all fans are allowed, such as Outback’s recent coupon giveaway…do you know whether that’s right or not?
December 1st, 2009 at 9:09 am
I mean, can you make it something only visible to fans and say that they have to become a fan to get it, but they WILL get it…i.e. there is no chance or skill involved.
December 1st, 2009 at 9:20 am
After reading the new facebook policies for pages, i feel facebook in a way is trying to gain control on the online rights of the marketers. facebook will not be in benefit after changing the page policies in such a weired manner.
December 1st, 2009 at 6:52 pm
[...] Facebook recently published a post, Marketers and Agencies Figuring Out How to Navigate Facebook’s New Contest Rules, outlining the updated promo/sweeps guidelines from Facebook. According to the post, the two main [...]
December 2nd, 2009 at 7:19 am
The main problem we have encountered is trying to get a response from Facebook. We have multiple promotions that we would like to administer on Facebook and we have modified our promotions to follow the updated promotion guidelines but we have not been able to get a response from Facebook. However, it has been two weeks and we are unable to launch because we have do not have expressed written permission from Facebook. Has anyone had any luck contacting Facebook?
December 2nd, 2009 at 4:44 pm
I’m sorry but Facebook is behaving atrociously. They are becoming a horrible greedy little company… The whopper sacrifice won loads of awards this year yet was shut down after 10 days.
Now they are shutting down the ability to use facebooks video and photo functionality for campaign. Absolute stupidity… and all without and kind of support for agencies or companys.
We have been developing facebook connect applications and they (without much warning) totally change the way we have to implement cost time and aswell as peeing off the client…
Companies need to fight back the way the people using facebook do when they change things, or Facebook need to start being more transparent.
December 3rd, 2009 at 12:37 am
[...] to the new rules, pages must send users to a custom application tab to enter contests. As InsideFacebook [...]
December 18th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
[...] I hear that the rules have been changed to prevent this. I post in full a status report from “Inside Facebook”. Sorry about being late on this. Hats off to @jmorris106 for the [...]
December 26th, 2009 at 4:07 am
[...] taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The … 5 Likes Marketers and Agencies Figuring Out How to Navigate Facebook’s New Contest Rules 5 Likes @DanielKapp und die Jubelperser | BäckBlog Seit gut zwei Wochen [...]
January 7th, 2010 at 10:00 pm
[...] to the new rules, pages must send users to a custom application tab to enter contests. As InsideFacebook [...]
January 12th, 2010 at 7:54 am
[...] of contests – Facebook has recently announced regulations for hosting contests on Facebook. Contests that require commenting on or responding [...]
January 17th, 2010 at 6:49 am
[...] här är tillåtet. I november när Facebook ändrade sina regler skrev Justin Smith i inlägget ”Marketers and Agencies Figuring Out How to Navigate Facebook’s New Contest Rules” i Inside Facebook att det blir förbjudet att ordna tävlingar eller kampanjer som kräver att [...]
March 19th, 2010 at 5:52 am
[...] Also my apologies to faithful fans of Dance Advantage on Facebook. I’d throw you a little extra entry love if it weren’t against Facebook rules. [...]
May 9th, 2010 at 3:31 am
[...] Po IKEA akcijos, kuriai buvo naudojamas foto modulis, FB‘as standartines funkcijas uždraudė na…. Norint surengti tokį konkursą (nenaudojant trečiųjų šalių apps‘ų), reikia gauti Facebook sutikimą. [...]