Facebook lift third-party app competition proviso
Late last month Facebook made an announcement that made a lot of small business owners very happy. They announced that they were ditching their third-party app proviso for competitions and promotions ran by brands and businesses on their Facebook pages. In another business friendly move they announced a collaboration with stock photo company Shutterstock to make millions of images from its library accessible to businesses for use in their ads at no additional cost.
What does this mean exactly?
Until recently, Facebook’s rules were roughly as follows:
- You cannot run competitions directly on Facebook
- You cannot use Facebook functions to enter competitions.
- Clear competition rules and terms and conditions should be visible directly on the competition page (hosted outside out Facebook).
- You cannot notify winners through Facebook.
Whilst many chose to flout these rules, others got around them by using third party apps hosted outside of Facebook, visible behind a ‘tab’ on a Facebook brand page. Although these are no longer a requirement, in many cases they are still the most effective, most efficient way of running competitions on Facebook.
So when should you opt for a tab-based competition?
- When you’re looking to grow your page’s audience (number of likes)
- When you’re looking to capture data from competition entrants (email address etc.)
- When you’re looking to collate image or video-based entries and/or use a voting mechanism
- When you’re looking to collate entries from Twitter and/or Instagram in addition to Facebook
- For a quiz where there is only one correct answer or set of answers
- When only a more complex, fully branded experience would do
When would a simple like/comment/share competition suffice?
- When your objective is to simply increase the organic reach of your posts (by offering an incentive to like or share)
- When you’re looking for straightforward comment responses
Read how we’ve used Facebook competitions to grow our clients’ social media audiences and increase on-page engagement here.
