Last week, Facebook amended their rules for contests and sweepstakes that take place on the site. Most of the changes seem to be designed to make a clear separation between the promotion and Facebook itself, and to prevent the promotion from compromising the Facebook experience.
The first and most important change is that all promotions must be approved—in writing—by Facebook at least seven days before the start of the contest. Part of that approval process is ensuring that the promotion makes it clear that Facebook is not associated with the promotion in any way.
Also, all promotions running on Facebook must be contained within their own app, and entries can only be accepted via the canvas page of the app or an application box on a tab on the Facebook page.
That means that contests cannot ask entrants to post to the page’s Wall, or change their status update or upload photos via Facebook’s photo uploader in order to be considered for a prize. A promotion also can’t require entrants to post a comment to a Wall item, since that would artificially inflate the item’s importance and effectively lead to it spamming users’ News Feeds.
Finally, no promotion can use any Facebook messaging mechanism (Wall post, chat, message, poke, etc.) to administer the contest or alert winners. All communication must take place either through the app or other non-Facebook means, like email.
So what do our our current and future clients need to worry about if they want to run contests on Facebook to promote their brands? Absolutely nothing.
Not only do we have years of experience helping brands leverage social marketing to its fullest potential, we work closely with Facebook to stay abreast of these sorts of changes before they’re implemented. Every promotion that we have helped to launch on Facebook is in full compliance with these new rules, and every promotion that we develop going forward will always meet that standard.
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