One of the biggest mistakes I see small businesses making on Facebook is when they conduct competitions that are, in fact, breaking Facebook’s rules and can have very real and harsh penalties.
Whilst many people are aware of the rules governing promotions on Facebook, I still continue to see the rules being broken on a daily basis.
If you have a Facebook page for your business you really must familiarise yourself with Facebook’s Terms of Service and specifically their Page Guidelines.
Have you ever run a competition on your page that gives away a prize for liking or sharing one of your posts? Or perhaps you’ve rewarded the 100th person to like your page with a prize? Read the Facebook rules and you’ll discover that these types of promotions are strictly forbidden by the social networking giant.
So what can and can’t you do?
Plain and simple, you can’t run a competition on your Facebook page unless it is administered within a third party app.
You know those little boxes at the top of your page? You need to house your competition in one of those, which when you click takes you away from your Facebook Timeline Page. The example below shows 7-Eleven’s ‘Snack-O-Wheel’ competition, which is located within a third party app.
Other than liking your page, checking into a Place or connecting to your app, you cannot condition entry into your competition by the user taking any action using Facebook’s features of functionality. This means you can’t run a competition that requires the user to comment on your wall post or upload a photo to your wall.
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