Facebook Page Competitions and the rules

Transcript

Hi Everyone!

I hope you’re doing well, it’s Friday not long to go now, I thought I’d just do a very quick video, I was going to do this via desktop, but it appears it’s only strictly on the mobile version of Facebook  (Live)  I don’t know why, and I can’t do it in a Group for some reason either! So I’m here, on my Page.

It was just to go through a few things about Competitions; I see so many coming up in my personal timeline, it’s actually doing my head in, but I just thought, as a business you really should have a good idea and have a think about your Promotion or Competition on Facebook before you put it live.

NOw, I just did one recently for Blueocto, it was for a chance to win a website worth £1,500 and we have a winner for that, so congratulations!

I had to have a lot of think about when I was going to have a deadline for my competition, how I was going to promote it, was it strictly going to be Facebook? How was I going to decide the winner as well?
Now the deadline, I think I pretty much had 2 ½ weeks of this promotion going on, and I timed my posts about it very carefully, and shared it myself personally, in certain Groups that I felt were very targetted.

But, one big thing I keep seeing often, is you cannot ask people to Share your Facebook Competition, it’s against the Facebook T&C’s and Guidelines – now I can post up the link to where you can find this information – Page Guidelines – Section E. Promotions – but just to run through a few pointers, I’ve got my reference here on screen – excuse me for looking up at the screen here.

You can ask someone to Like the actual post itself that has the competition on it, on your timeline, you can ask them to Like that to enter the competition and you ask them to comment on that particular post as well.

You can get them to post on your timeline, and you can get them to send a private message to you on your Facebook Page to enter, and there are other mechanisms as well – such as submitting their name to put it in an entry form, that might be on your website as well and redirect them to that.

But things you can’t do is, is ask them to Share your actual Page to enter, to Share the post, to Like your Page to enter, Like a different Page to enter, Like multiple Page’s to enter if you’ve got a few business websites. You can’t ask them to Tag people in that, the idea around that is, in general, it’s considered as spam on Facebook.

So even if you as a personal Profile, are going around tagging people into pictures, that doesn’t have that physical person in that picture, and they un-tag themselves or mark it as spam, your account will start to become affiliated with spam in general.

My understanding is that Facebook does not directly look at just your Facebook Page, they are looking at your account as well because it’s linked to that. You might have multiple business accounts on there and you might be trying to do the same thing across the board. So they do look at your personal account as a whole.

If you are being quite spammy on your Facebook Page, chances are you going to be quite spammy on your personal Profile as well.

You can’t ask people to Share the contest on a Friend’s timeline as well, you’ve gotta think of it as, if everyone started doing that, all their personal timelines would just consist of these competitions – are they even genuine competitions, I don’t know?

If someone can’t take the time to read the Guidelines, then are they going to take the time to choose the winner in a genuine manner as well? so keep an eye out for that.

If you do see anyone doing it, it does actually help Facebook if you report that as spam, because then they can understand how bad the problem is, and tighten down, there is a lot of calls for this as well, so that’s very helpful.

…just trying to think if there is anything else you might need to know.

It might be worth highlighting on your competition what your specific rules are. A lot of companies have to be very careful about what they’re doing, you have to ensure in UK Competition Law that it’s not a type of lottery or a sweepstake, things like that and you’re not getting into the sort of gambling laws as well.

So do check that out, do your homework before you post that online. But otherwise, you can have a lot of fun with it, and Facebook now own’s Instagram, so you can cross-promote, you can put it in your Ads, you can do it as an actual paid-for Ad as well.

If you do have any questions, don’t hesitate to pop it in the  (Facebook)  comments, and I’ll do what I can to help you.

Great, thanks, byee!