Facebook contests can win businesses the jackpot

July 2, 2011

CALGARY, AB, June 2, 2011/ Troy Media/ – With over 600 million users, it’s no wonder marketers want to run promotions on Facebook. Giveaways, photo contests, coupons, and sweepstakes – everyone is excited to generate buzz on Facebook through classic promotional means.

Trouble is, Facebook pretty much forbids it.

Use the apps for your contest

Fret not, though, dear marketeers, there is a way to safely launch your uber-viral over the top super-duper call-before-midnight-tonight giveaway. It hinges on the use of Facebook applications instead of Facebook’s “native functionality” (meaning the stuff Facebook does out of the box.)

As practically everyone now knows, Facebook makes it easy to share text, photos and videos, even on business pages, and to like, comment and share those content items. So the natural inclination of your average marketer is to say, “Hey folks, upload your photos to our Facebook wall to win,” essentially using Facebook’s wall function as the entry form for a draw.

Facebook’s lawyers want no part of this. Even offline, sweepstakes and contest legislation varies from state to state, province to province. Imagine the lawsuits that Facebook might endure if Joe Contestant swears he uploaded his photo to the wall before midnight but “there was a glitch.” Joe Contestant’s lawyer is going to want to squeeze the dream home that was on the line out of Facebook, no doubt blaming them for the breakdown in the contest entry process.

No way, says Facebook.

Over the past year or so, Facebook has repeatedly changed their promotions guidelines baffling almost everyone in the doing. Most contests running on Facebook are in violation of the terms and the contest/page owners run the risk of being booted off Facebook, not exactly the prize they were looking for.

Read the rules for yourself, but the short version is, your contest must run in a Facebook app, not using out of the box Facebook features. In other words, no enter to win by post, like, share or comment is allowed. The contest must run outside Facebook but, by using an app, it can be visible inside Facebook.

The most common way to achieve this is to use an application like Wildfire or Strutta. You go to Wildfireapp.com or Strutta.com and build a promotion using their wizard. Then you lay down your credit card to pay for this service (it can be as cheap as $5 setup and $.99 per day or as expensive as $1999 setup and $199/month, even higher for custom applications), and install the app onto your Facebook page. The net effect is your contest sort of “floats” in a window on top of Facebook, thus absolving Facebook of all legal responsibility.

A more advanced way is to have your web geek build the contest on your own website, then use one of the many Facebook iframes apps to “suck” those web pages into a window in Facebook. The effect is the same, the contest runs on your own website but also floats on top of your Facebook page in an iframe.

Keep it simple

Every time I have a conversation with a client about this, it quickly becomes obvious you need to whiteboard the contest flow and make it really simple for people to enter. If a person has to click multiple times, give up a bunch of personal info, enter one of those horrid CAPTCHA codes to prove they’re human, then scan a QR code to see what they’ve won, you’re unlikely to get many entries. Heck, even in the real world it’s hard enough to get people to scribble their name and phone number on a slip of paper.

Successful promotions are easy to enter, easy to administer, well understood by all, and adhere to all regulations. Don’t tempt fate by contravening Facebook’s regulations for contests, or you may find you have run the anti-promotion by losing your page.

Wouldn’t that be embarrassing at the next marketing meeting?

Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto. Feel free to send all sweepstakes winnings to @dblacombe on Twitter.