Facebook change their promotion rules

Facebook December 2, 2010 2 Comments

When Facebook introduced a complete change to their competition guidelines last year, it left lots of Facebook page owners in the lurch. If you chose to play by the rules it meant that you had to run a competition through an app as a separate tab and that every competition or promotion had to be pre-approved by Facebook. For page owners that didn’t have an account manager at Facebook or a high media spend, it was fairly difficult to run a competition legitimately. And if you got caught doing it the wrong way, there’s a good chance Facebook would remove your page altogether. Now though, Facebook have made a couple of changes to the rules that will make it a bit easier to run promotions. We’ve had these changes confirmed by Facebook today.

No minimum spend required

Facebook have changed the rule so that you no longer need a minimum media spend to support the promotion. In a nutshell, this means that companies with much smaller budgets can now legitimately run competitions. This will certainly be welcome news for smaller organisations and makes running a competition or promotion much easier.

No longer need approval from Facebook

If you were running a competition in the right way before, every promotion had to be submitted for approval to Facebook before it could run. Unless you were lucky enough to have an account manager that would accommodate you, this could take at least 2 weeks to get full approval, meaning it was hard to run spontaneous competitions. And for those that didn’t have a contact at Facebook it meant that you weren’t able to run a competition and remain within the terms and conditions. As all the other rules still apply however, I’d recommend that you’re extra vigilant when putting a competition together and considering the guidelines, as Facebook won’t spot any mistakes for you!

Bonus – check in for a competition

While this wasn’t announced in their most recent changes to promotion guidelines, I’ve just spotted that Facebook are now permitting you to require someone to ‘check in’ to a place before entering a competition. The rules on running a competition through Facebook Places weren’t overly clear before and it’s encouraging to see that they’re now including this as a valid mechanic for a competition. You can check out all the Facebook promotion guiedlines in full here . Unfortunately Facebook still aren’t reverting on the rule that you’re not allowed to run a competition that requires status updates, wall comments, or uploading photos (unless it’s a third party app).

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