Facebook Promotions

Running promotions on Facebook is a common practice for businesses to increase Likes on their company pages since they are more likely to go viral. A promotion is a contest that you may run on your Facebook Page offering back a prize to your fans. In the meantime this results in your contents in going viral and increasing the number of Likes on your page. This is one of the major objectives of most businesses as fans are highly likely to convert to customers and recommend your products.

Facebook promotions are most commonly run through a third-party app which has the functionality to administer the contest. To create a third-party app you require the help of a developer to get it going. However now Facebook has updated their guidelines for promotions and a third party app is not a requirement anymore. Now business can in fact use the Facebook page functionality such as comments to create a contest. These competitions where somewhat common however prior to these updates these contest did in fact break Facebook’s guidelines and could lead to having a page terminated.

Now businesses can collect entries to a contest by having users posting on the Page or even commenting or liking on a page post. Entries to a contest can also be collected by users using the Page message functionality. Finally the like functionality can be used to count votes.

This creates new opportunities for businesses especially small businesses where they can do without third party app costs. However administering contests from the Page functionality can be challenging at times and can mess up the Page timeline layout.  These more flexible guidelines however now have included tagging guidelines. The guidelines now prohibit from Pages tagging users which they are not shown in. Such as tagging users to a promotional banner or telling users to tag themselves to this promotional banner is not allowed. It is also important to note that contests must be run on the Page timeline and not on personal timelines. For instance asking users to share a post on their personal timeline/wall to enter in a contest is not allowed.

These new guidelines are definitely a huge relief for marketing and business owners! Now with some creativity you can have a contest running. This doesn’t mean that contest running from apps are going to die. Both will exist and both are to be used to one’s advantage. You can create simple contest using a Page post which due to the interaction from several users can get the post viral. However you can create a much more interactive and complex contests using a Facebook app.

 
Conrad Bugeja is an SEO and PPC Consultant in the Internet Marketing division of Alert eBusiness (www.alertemarketing.com)