Facebook is a great way to grow your brand, and contests are a great way to grow your Facebook following, but we shied away from recommending them because the Facebook contest rules were pretty strict. You had to use a third-party app, and even then, they seemed to not really like when businesses ran them. This week, all that is changing though. Now, Facebook is updating its contest rules for businesses and allowing people to run them freely on timelines without any kind of permission or third-party app. Let’s take a look at how this new facet of Facebook marketing will go into effect.
Facebook isn’t just allowing contests, they are actually embracing them.
“We want to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to create and administer promotions on Facebook, and to align our policies to better meet the needs of marketers,” Facebook stated in its promotions guidelines document.
With the new policy, businesses can run promotions on their timelines and gain fans by having users either post on the page or like the page to enter the contest. They can also utilize likes as a voting mechanism, posting two alternatives and letting the one with more likes be the winner of the contest.
Here is an example of a good contest by the new Facebook standards:
Even though they are natively supporting contests now, Facebook is still supporting the use of apps:
Creating a promotion with an app on Facebook allows a Page to create a more personalized experience, more in line with your branding strategy.
Apps provide more space and flexibility for content than Page posts alone. Promotions run through apps can collect data in a secure, structured way that may be appealing to advertisers, particularly larger brands.
Creating a promotion with a Page is faster and easier. Additionally, as with all Page posts, Page posts about promotions are eligible to be displayed in the News Feeds of the people who like the Page and can be promoted to a broader audience.
Businesses always have the option of using both an app and their Page to administer a promotion.
If you’d like to know more about running your own contests, you can follow the link to the new promotions guidelines here. If you’d like direct help creating a Facebook ad, don’t hesitate to contact us here at Wikimotive. The first ad is on us!