9 top tips for navigating Facebook’s promotional guidelines

Facebook has undoubtedly become the platform of choice when it comes to connecting the masses – and the statistics are mind blowing. Almost 600-million users worldwide [and growing], including 3.5-million in South Africa alone.

It is further estimated that users spend more than 700-billion minutes per month on the site and have an average of 130 friends – a captive audience by any marketing standards.

However, as much as Facebook is accessible and easy to navigate in terms of setting up Fan Pages, and starting interactions with end users, it doesn’t operate without a set of Promotional Guidelines. These guidelines have been created in an effort to ensure that promotions contribute to and are consistent with the overall user experience.

By not adhering to the guidelines, companies and brands risk having their promotions and competitions removed from Facebook without prior warning. It is a case, quite literally, of here today and gone tomorrow.

So what are the guidelines? With an exhaustive list available online, we have identified a list of top guidelines for marketers and advertising buyers to consider before embarking on a campaign:

1. Where Facebook’s approval was previously required for publicising a promotion on the portal, this is no longer the case. However, Facebook may remove any materials relating to the promotion or disable your account if it determines that you are in violation of the Promotional Guidelines, the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities or any other Facebook policies.
2. You are not allowed to condition entry into the promotion upon a user providing content on Facebook such as making a post on a profile or page, status comment or photo upload.
3. You can use a third party application to condition entry to the promotion upon a user providing content – for example, you may administer a photo contest whereby a user uploads a photo through a third party application to enter the competition.
4. You cannot administer a promotion where users automatically enter by becoming a fan of your page.
5. You can allow that only fans of your page can access the tab that contains the third party application for the promotion.
6. You are not allowed to notify winners through Facebook such as Facebook messages, chat or posts on profiles or pages.
7. You can collect an address or emails through the third party application for the promotion in order to contact the winner by email or standard mail.
8. You cannot instruct people (in the rules or elsewhere) to sign up for a Facebook account before they enter the promotion.
9. You may instruct users to visit a third party application to enter the promotion. This means that, since users must have a Facebook account in order to access an application on the platform, they will be prompted to sign up for a Facebook account if they do not already have one.