How the new Facebook Promotion Guidelines affect you

Facebook announced on November 4 new guidelines for how administrators of groups and pages can promote competitions and/or sweepstakes.

For alot of smaller to medium sized businesses this will have a huge impact on how they are already interacting with customers through Facebook. I won’t go into the finer points of the new changes, but here are a few of the points that really stick out and that you MUST take note of.

1. You will need written authorization from a Facebook account manager BEFORE you administer the promotion

2. All promotions must be on a 3rd party Facebook platform (more on this later)

3. And under Section 4 of the new lengthy rules, a prohibition that I already see alot of my friends infringeing on :

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.

This rules out the company that has established their Facebook presence as the main place to meetup with their fans and offer incentives and comps. So what kind of competitions does this rule out:

- Upload a photo to Facebook as entry to a competition

- Get your friends to join your fan page or refer others in exchange for the chance of winning a prize

- Add a comment to a fan page or group as entry to a competition

If you are running any kind of competition like this on Facebook, you’ll need to cease and desist or face the suspension of your group or fan page. The only workaround is to work with a 3rd party platform (such as Wildfire, which would be pricey for a fan page with less than 500 fans) or by creating your own Facebook application to run the promotion through.

I suggest you read the full guidelines as specified by Facebook and err on the side of caution.

This just serves as a subtle reminder to not to put all your eggs in one basket. As Facebook fan pages have increased in popularity, so have their uses gone beyond the imagination of even Facebook. This recent move allows them to indemnify themselves of any wrong doing you may cause via your sweepstake.

You are still allowed to promote on Facebook any competition you are running outside of Facebook, say on Twitter or your own blog.

For more information and to hear how others weigh in, see:

Official Facebook Promotion Guidelines

Thinking of running a promotion on Facebook? Think again?

Facebook Marketers Beware – New Promotion Guidelines Released

How is this going to affect how you use Facebook for business?

CLARIFICATION :

This rule change mainly affects people creating a contest BASED ON the Facebook platform or which directly asks people/fans/friends to do something on Facebook in order to win. So, if you ask your blog readers to upload photos on your Facebook Fan Page in order to be in to win, this would be a no-no unless you had prior written consent from your Facebook account manager (getting an account manager is another story and not really an option for most small-medium sized business I deal with unless you have a minimum 10,000 USD budget to spend on Facebook).

If you create a competition on your website, blog, Ning that is irrelevant of Facebook – but you link to it from Facebook, that is fine. Just do not mention Facebook in the promotion on your site or else this could be in infringement of the rules. For example if you placed a post on your blog that said, “Refer your friends to my site using Twitter, email or Facebook” – mentioning Facebook is an infringement.

Hope that clears up some of the questions I have received today.