Facebook made changes to their competition and promotion guidelines that will have quite an effect on brands that use the platform.
What are the changes?
Businesses can now collect entries by having users post on the brand’s page, comment or like a certain post. Likes can now be used as a voting mechanism. Many brands may have been doing this already, but they were officially supposed to use a tab, or app to conduct these competitions in. What brands are not allowed to to is ask users to tag themselves in a photo posted by the brand.
Further reading: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2013/08/28/facebook-opens-up-promotions-policy-third-party-apps-no-longer-required/
How can a brand benefit?
Whilst larger competitions and promotions may well still benefit from 3rd party apps, smaller scale promotions could easily be deployed through the company Facebook page.
Local businesses could really benefit using targeted promoted posts directly from their pages to drive awareness and/or engagement.
Jeff Bullas had some quick ideas to get you going if you need inspiration for content to drive interaction on your timeline.
How can we help?
Obvious concerns about managing the responses, “fans” changing their answers to be more inline with other responses, potentially large number of comments, “sore” losers … there are many potential obstacles.
At EzyInsights we can help you monitor user activity and give actionable insights quickly into the posts:
- with awareness, e.g. “likes” if that’s all you’re interested in. (Really?)
- with amplification, e.g. “the shares”
- with conversation, e.g. what people are actually saying
What about you? Has your brand tried this new format yet? Did it work?
Does this help or hinder your relationship building with your fans? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.