Facebook has almost entirely negated my biggest beef with them. As you may have seen already, Facebook has changed their contest rules. Anyone who knows me or has read my blog long enough knows my biggest social media pet peeve was people & businesses who ran contests on Facebook that were against the rules and my beef with Facebook was their policing of them.
Well, now I step down off my soapbox… sort of.
According to the new Facebook contest rules, you can now –
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Collect entries by having users post on the Page or comment/like a Page post
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Collect entries by having users message the Page
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Utilize likes as a voting mechanism
So, that “Like and Comment to Win” contest you see on every other clothing or monogram boutique post is now Facebook legal.
HOWEVER you cannot require someone to share a post on their personal timeline to be entered to win. So see, I don’t have to step down entirely because I know there will a number of businesses that skip that line in the rules and require people to share graphics.
Now, this change can and will be beneficial for non-profits and smaller businesses with little to no budget for social media. They will see their likes increase. They may see increased engagement… but then again they may not. Most people enter a contest to win, not to be an active fan of that page. How many pages have you liked in order to enter a contest and then never engaged with that page again? 5? 10? I’ll be the first to admit I’ve done it.
Even though businesses can now do these contests from their wall, that doesn’t guarantee increased engagements and sales. They will still have to continue to provide quality, industry-related content to keep the fans engaged.
You will never see me run a contest on my Facebook wall. I will still continue to use a third-party application like EasyPromo Apps or Heyo. Other than the fact they shoulder the weight of handling the contest (and the legal jargon required by Facebook), they just look much more professional than a graphic posted on a Facebook wall.
Several friends chimed in with their takes on this and I suggest you check out their posts – we all have great, valid points on this matter and with all of us living, working and breathing social media we can see this from many vantage points…
“Back To Basics: Why The Facebook Contest Change Might Not Be All That Awesome!” by the Social Solutions Collective
“7 Reasons I Won’t Run a Facebook Contest on My Wall” by B Squared Media
“New Facebook Contest Changes Save Time and Money” by Heyo
What do you think? Is this good? bad? about time?
Now I’m off to spend a few hours updating all my blog posts where I talk about Facebook contests…
{Grabbing my pom poms} YAAAAAY, Mandy! I’m glad you looked at the options carefully before throwing up a contest on your wall haphazardly. For those of us who hold contests to grow our email and marketing lists (rather than for a boost in “likes” or engagement) this update does nothing for us. Well, it might really annoy us if/when we start seeing all of these “wall” contests on our Feeds.
Anyhow, glad that you’re on the side of smart and savvy marketing and asking people to take a moment to think about this new change!
LOL! Thanks Brooke! As with doing anything on social media, there must be intent behind it and look at the overall bigger picture. I’ve already seen 2 “Like and Share to Win” pop up in my newsfeed in the last 10 minutes :/
I’m with you, Mandy. I will stick with my app (Rafflecopter). I don’t see how this benefits users really. I get the small biz connection, but overall I think this was a poor decision on their part. I see this as just another way to try and get business owners to pay to “boost posts”.
I agree Katherine, but I also think they did this because they finally came to their senses and realized there was no way they could police it. There were pages with over 100,000 likes running contests they shouldn’t have been running.
Mandy,
That was one of my pet peeves, too. On wall/like contests were against the policies, but never enforced. I had a hard time convincing clients to “play by the rules” when they say others getting away with ignoring the policy.
Time will tell if small businesses abuse this.
I think this is good for small businesses that have virtually no budget, but I hope it doesn’t turn into a massive newsfeed of contests.