WARNING: New Facebook Promotions Guidelines May Get Your Account or Fan Page Disabled
Do you run contests, competitions or sweepstakes from your Facebook profile or fan page? If you do, you’d better read this! If you violate Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines, you run the risk of having your Facebook account or Fan Pages disabled.
I’ve gone over Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines (revised November 4, 2009) several times trying to decipher them. The good news is, I think I made some sense of them finally. And I want to share my opinion with you!
Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines cover what you CAN and CANNOT do in regard to Administering and Publicizing; Sweepstakes, Contests and Competitions. It also provides their definitions of the previous terms. You need to understand their definitions in order to decipher the rest of their document.
According to Facebook:
Sweepstakes = a promotion that includes a Prize and a Winner selected on the basis of chance.
Contest or Competition = a promotion that includes a Prize and a Winner determined on the basis of skill.
Publicize on Facebook = promoting, advertising or referencing a promotion in any way on Facebook or using any part of the Facebook Platform.
Administer on Facebook = operating any element of the promotion on Facebook or using any part of the Facebook Platform.
The bottom line is that you:
- CANNOT administer (run) any promotion on Facebook without prior written approval. (If you are not a very large company I seriously doubt that Facebook will respond to your request for approval but they do provide a link to a contact form in Section 3 of their guidelines.)
- CAN “publicize” a promotion that is “administered” completely off of Facebook (see Section 4 of their guidelines for restrictions).
- CANNOT state in the rules of the promotion, or elsewhere, that a person must take any type of action on Facebook in order to enter your promotion. This means you CANNOT require anyone to update their status, post on a profile, post on a fan page, respond to one of your posts on Facebook, upload a photo, become a fan of your page, etc…
- CANNOT use Facebook’s name, trademarks, trade names, copyrights or any other intellectual property belonging to Facebook…in the rules or any other materials relating to your promotion without express written consent. (See Section 1.3 of their guidelines.)
But wait, don’t give up yet! You can ADMINISTER a promotion on your blog or website and then PUBLICIZE it on Facebook. One way you could do this is:
- write a blog post about your promotion
- in the blog post ask readers to respond in the comments of your blog or submit their response/photo/etc…to you via email or some other method outside of Facebook
- import your blog post onto your fan page via RSS Feed or simply write a short status update to “publicize” your promotion and then attach a link to your blog
If you’ve run promotions before or can think of other ways to administer your promotions outside of Facebook, PLEASE post a comment below and share your insight will all of our readers. Thanks!
Your Facebook Informant,
Kimberly Yow
Become a Fan of my Fan Page: Social Networking 4 Biz
P.S. - I am a Facebook consultant & trainer and I help businesses get found on the internet. Subscribe to this blog via RSS Feed or Email so you don't miss any free Facebook For Business Tips! @KimberlyYow
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thanks Kimberly,
posting now
Terri
So what do you think about this situtation:
One company post a wall post on thier page to send their fans to another partner fan page to enter a photo contest. Fans then post a photo…photo with most “likes” by fans and friends wins. Is this ok?
Hi Dave,
I pulled out text from the Facebook promotional guidelines to answer this….see below.
What you described is against Facebook’s promotional guidelines unless you have their written approval. And the assumption is to get their approval you need a healthy promo budget. You’ll notice if you click their “contact form” link, the starting budget that you can select is <$10,000.
Kimberly