Running a competition on Facebook Page is very important. A Facebook competition can help you to grow your brand’s fanbase and people who like you. However, the dirty work didn’t stop here. Here is the situation: you might want to run some easy contest where people just need to post some photos of themselves on your Page’s wall along with your product, then tag themselves and your Page and at least ten of their friends for a chance to win a $3 voucher. While it sounds like a great idea, there are several problems with this idea. The biggest problem is that you would be violating Facebook’s Terms of Service, and in doing so risking both your competition and Page as well.
However, there are tips and tricks to conduct your Facebook competition without making Zuckerberg angry. By following these tips and tricks, the chance your Page being shut can be minimised or completely avoided.
1). Set Up Your Goals
What are the main reasons behind this competition? How is the competition going to achieve your objectives? Don’t just run a Facebook competition without any reasonable reasons. You need to understand what you’re trying to achieve in order to figure out what your competition should look like, who it will target and everything else. So are you doing it to grow your community, or to engage your current fanbase or do you want to increase awareness about a new product? Or something else?
2). Describe the Details of Your Competition
What are the prizes? What are the requirements to join the competition? How does people compete for winning? Don’t make them too hard or complicated, otherwise you won’t get many entries. Keep this in mind when arranging any complicated rule of the game. Even having to write too much stuff or think too hard is going to impact on your volume of entries. Unless your prize is worth the hard work, keep your competition’s rules and requirements simple.
Pay attention on some licensing issues. In most states of Australia, for instance, you cannot run a random draw competition without applying to each state authority for a permit. This is not only time-consuming, but also costs money. You can get around this by making “other kind of competitions”, like a game of skill where people have to submit some sort of creative content.
You will also need to state the clear terms and conditions and link to this within your competition. People will need to see the fine print of your competition.
3). Tell Other People about Your Competition
How will you get additional entries, aside from your current fans? Is it worth to do a Facebook Promote Post plan to tell the wider community about your competition? Are the prizes good enough to do a viral sharing? If you can’t afford for any promotion, you may forget your plan to do a competition as well.
4). Pay Attention to Facebook’s Term of Services
How will your competition actually run on Facebook? What does the user experience look like? Does your competition violate Facebook Terms of Services? There are a lot of rules for running Facebook competitions and promotions, like you cannot run one on your wall. You cannot ask people to tag themselves in a photo or post something to your wall or like a status or post a photo on your wall in order to win the competition. You cannot make the entry mechanism just liking your Page, although you can make them to like your Page before being able to enter. This is particularly important if you have not yet a large amount of dollars on advertising on the Facebook platform. If you have, you may be able to convince Facebook officials to bring back your page if you agree that your lesson has been learnt.
5). Build your Facebook Competition Apps
This doesn’t have to be as scary as it sounds. You don’t need to find a developer and pay them millions of dollars. There are a few ways to build Facebook tabs, and one of the easiest is using a tool like Shortstack. Alternatively you can get a web person to build an HTML application on your site that adheres to Facebook app specs (ie. is no more than 810px wide).
6). Put a Privacy Policy
This one is like a bit optional unless Facebook catches you out. Typically, you’re meant to have some sort of Facebook Privacy Policy somewhere in your competition, that indicates to people what you will be doing with their private data once you collect it through your competition application. You’ll need to include that in there. Whoever puts your application together in Facebook will need the URL of this privacy policy to put in the app, otherwise Facebook might send you an email that they will remove your application if no further action are taken.
7). Run the Competition and Announce the Winner Afterwards
It’s quite obvious, right? Execute your best plan and avoid any kind of trickery or swindle. Have a nice competition.