New Facebook promotion rules allow brands to run promotions directly on their pages for engagement through likes, posts, and comments as of August 27, 2013. Brands must ensure proper tracking and moderation of entries while adhering to legal requirements and best practices. It is crucial to maintain quality content and carefully plan promotions to prevent potential risks and brand damage.

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Facebook promotions – New Rules. 10 tips
1. Up until 26 August Facebook rules said promotions had to be run in an
App. However as of 27 August 2013, promotions can now be run on any
business/brand Pages (as well as Apps). That means you can get people to enter
a promotion by posting, commenting or liking a post on a brand page wall.
2. If a brand runs a promotion they can now use the ‘Like’, ‘Post’ or ‘Comment’
functions to enter a promotion.
3. You are not allowed to ask fans to utilise their personal timeline as a mechanism
to enter a promotion.
4. In the spirit of good practice and governance you still need to provide T&C’s (Risk
planning and contingence).
5. If you previously needed legal permits and licences you will still need them.
6. Tracking entries: Promoters will need to be certain they can gather analytics
that allow them to track entries – that means tracking every comment, post, like
etc. that becomes part of the entry procedure. It’s not clear how brands will be
able to deal with high traffic for really popular promotions. At Online Circle
Digital we are developing this feature within SocialPulse publishing.
7. Moderation: For ‘comment/post to enter’ promotions, moderation of comments
will need to be ramped up including nights and weekends.
8. Following through: People who go live with promotions without thinking
through the practical issues of a promotion will be taking a big risk. A half-baked
promotion might be shut down or face challenges for a range of reasons – if FB
finds that the T&Cs don’t contain mandatory wording, if winners can’t be
contacted, if entries can’t be tracked or get lost, or if the promotion has to be
pulled to prevent brand damage for any other reason.
9. Quality content is still of utmost importance. In the early stages of this new
feature, some brands may over-saturate their fans with simple and repetitive
promotions. There needs to be a balance or combination with truly engaging
content.
10. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should – a badly run promotion can do
more harm than good. Cheaper to plan than to fix.
Any tips for Facebook promotions?
If you are going to run a promotion outside of an app, answer the following questions:
a) How will it be run and won?
b) How will entry info be collected, stored and used?
In doubt – ask. Ask Legal, ask Corporate Affairs ask the Lead Strategist, ask a senior
community manager.
Written by: Lucio Ribeiro