The Hidden Issues With Running A Facebook Competition

August 11, 2010 Written by Social Media

Zuckerburg – oh how you pain me!Facebook1 The Hidden Issues With Running A Facebook Competition

Recently we’ve been working with one of our clients to get a facebook competition up and running…

Here’s the skinny of what we’ve come up against:

Firstly, finding info on what you can and cannot do is insanely hard. There is this resource but it’s not anywhere near detailed enough about competitions.

This is what it doesn’t tell you…

You cannot, I repeat cannot run any sort of competition in an FBML tab…unless you have a monthly add spend of 15k (or around 5k if you partner with Wildfire). This makes it completely unrealistic for the small or medium sized business.

What’s more you need your competition to be approved by a Facebook client rep – easier said than done.

In order to gain this approval firstly you need get hold of Facebook.

Then once you’ve explained what your competition is you must ensure that your FB comp complies with all the rules about who’s server the info is going to be housed on.

You also need to insert a disclaimer disassociating your competition with Facebook.

Oh and if you don’t  follow the rules and you get caught by big bad Facebook you’re likely to loose all your fans

So imagine you’ve forked out all the advertising coin, you’ve worked with a rep and made sure that nothing is hosted on Facebook, you’ve added a disclaimer and built a beautiful FBML tab…

You now have to get ready to resize and recode your FBML tab (A description of Facebooks changes here).

What’s an SME to do???

Do you have to leave Facebook competitions for the big boys? Well not really, there are two alternatives…

  • Give prizes away randomly to Fans who are awesome and then just let the positive word of mouth flow through your page.

Or

  • Set up a comp that is run through your website and create a pimping FBML tab about your competition. But make it clear that the competition is hosted elsewhere.

If you have given either of these alternative promotions a go please let us know how they’ve worked out for you.

FaceBook Pimp Thumb 150x150 The Hidden Issues With Running A Facebook Competition

Do uThnk  Facebook make it too hard to run promotions? If so are they justified in doing this?

This is another in our series of posts about Pimping Your Facebook Page: Stay tuned for more ideas about pimping out your Facebook Page

  • http://twitter.com/andrew_bidese Andrew Bidese

    Hi Sam, great article thanks for sharing your experience. Not restricting yourself to facebook you could try http://crowdcampaign.com/. Have recently run a competition through CrowdCampaign as was very pleased with the results. Let me know if you want more info!!

  • socialsammy

    Hi Andrew

    Thanks for sharing the link looks like a great service. I love how easy it is to sign in…I'll have a look around and get back to you.

    I think what I forgot to say in this post which is the real clincher is that if you are caught violating any of FB's rules they can strip you of all you fans…big incentive to follow the rules. So any alternative solution is a bonus. So once again thanks for the link.

  • http://www.myacademic.co.za Henry Vanderwalt

    This is a great Article – thanks. Is there somewhere that you can submit your page to see if it adhere to the Facebook rules?

    I really don’t want to spend all this money and have the page close down.

    Thanks
    Henry