Don’t Give Facebook a Reason to Delete Your Page
A Summary of Facebook's Promotional Guidelines
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Maybe you are considering creating a Facebook Page for your company or perhaps you are already actively engaging your fans, consumers and business contacts via your company’s Facebook Page. As a page administrator the most important information to know is Facebook’s Promotional Guidelines. If you already know the guidelines, were you aware that they were revised and updated just two weeks ago?
If you run promotions and competitions and fail to comply with the guidelines you could find your page suspended or deleted by Facebook. Imagine seeing all the time and resources you’ve put into building your pages and follower base go down the drain. Not to mention loosing a key communication channels to your consumers and followers.
Facebook’s Promotional Guidelines
Note that these guidelines change often. Always make sure to drop by the official guidelines page to see the most recent guidelines.
Guidelines Summary
There’s a few key points in the promotional guidelines you should make sure you understand and follow:
- You must make sure to mention that Facebook is not connected to your promotion in any way and not to use any of their intellectual property to promote your competition.
- You cannot condition participation by using Facebook features such as (but not limited to) commenting and uploading photos.
- You can request followers to Like your Page or check in to a location as part of the conditions to enter a competition
- You cannot run competitions or promotions of any kind directly on the Wall
- To run competitions and promotions you must use an application – either a canvas application or an application on a page tab. Note: All the pages you create in eMarketeer are apps on page tabs – so you are good here.
- Followers cannot be asked to post a status update to enter a competition.
- You cannot automatically enter followers into a competition or promotion if they Like your page, they must give consent to enter your competition.
- You cannot notify competition winners through Facebook chat, messages or through post updates.
- You can notify them through email so make sure your app/page can collect email addresses e.g. by using eMarketeer forms on Facebook.
This is only a summary of some key points, and the rules do change from time to time so remember to check out the full and current set of Facebook Promotion Guidelines here before you launch your promotion and contest.
I am no lawyer and please do not regard this as legal advice to any extent. I merely want to bring attention to some rules that many companies and marketers are not aware of and that can have pretty harsh implications on your marketing mix if you loose your Facebook page and all of your followers.
