Everyone loves a competition, and companies have used competitions and promotions for years to raise brand awareness, acquire customers, leads and newsletter sign-ups. Where as on Twitter the ability to run a promotion has been fairly easy, and with little restriction put in place by the channel itself, Facebook has taken a tougher stance.

Possibly to prevent their system of Likes from being gamed or artificially inflated, or due to some other factor they never divulged. Facebook required all competitions to be run via 3rd party applications.

All Change

It seems that now Facebook have changed their mind, and are now allowing businesses to leverage Likes and Facebook Pages to run their promotion.

3rd party applications may still have their place if you want to do anything technically special, but now you can ask someone to Like or comment on a Page as part of a promotion entry requirement.

This may have something to do with Promoted Posts becoming more widely used, why you could even use it to promote your competition!

Terms & Conditions

Facebook are still being fairly strict though, not wanting you to associate your promotion in anyway with them, stating “…you are responsible for the lawful operation of that promotion” and that you must give “Acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.”

One other thing, although you can use your Facebook Page for a promotion you cannot leverage Personal Timelines, so for example you cannot say “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries”.

You can read the full guidelines for Facebook Pages here.

For a lot of small businesses this could help to boost page Likes, and avoid the cost and complication of using a 3rd party application. Also, due to the simplicity of implementation the barrier to entry for the public will be lower, hopefully leading to a better return for business.

Enter Here

If you are running a competition on Facebook, feel free to add a link to it in the comments below.

[Photo Credit: potential past]