Creative Touch is excited to share the news that Facebook announced some drastic changes regarding their promotional guidelines. Where fan page contents within the Timeline used to be expressly frowned upon (read forbidden), now the lives of small and medium sized business owners are much easier.
Now running a facebook content is as simple as asking for a like, comment or message in a status update. It is NO LONGER REQUIRED that contests be administered through third party apps.
What does this mean for you?
You can now run basic facebook contents directly in the Timeline of your business fan page. This will allow more small and medium sized businesses to participate in and benefit from social contests.
On Tuesday, Facebook announced these updates to its contest guidelines via a blog post on the Facebook for Business page. Of course, one of the most prominent changes is the removal of required third party apps to run Facebook contests and promotions. You can find the updates here: New Facebook contest changes
“We’ve removed the requirement that promotions on Facebook only be administered through apps. Now, promotions may be administered on Page Timelines AND in apps on Facebook. For example, businesses can now:
- Collect entries by having users post on the Page or comment/like a Page post
- Collect entries by having users message the Page
- Utilize likes as a voting mechanism”
What does this mean for you, the business owner?
For one, your barrier to entry has been significantly lowered since people can enter straight through their News Feed via your Facebook post. Most likely, this will result in more people engaging with your brand and entering your contests. Creative Touch however ask you to keep the following in mind:
– Running a competition on your wall means your competition entrants are no longer required to like your page before they enter the competition, since there is no app with a like gateway
– If your competition requires a “like” as an entry, there really is no way to engage with customers with follow-ups, since they weren’t asked to provide email addresses/contact numbers (which is what you can collect with your third party app entry form).
– Even if you ask for contact details in the comment section, competition entrants may understandably be very reluctant to divulge their info on a public page where it is seen by people other than their friends.
However, this is a great change, and can very well be used as a teaser still with an app entry form, or if you just want to run an informal competition to engage activity on your page.
Keep us posted on our facebook page with how you feel about this change: CREATIVE TOUCH
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