3 Reasons Facebook Promotion Guidelines Aren’t Followed

Facebook Promotion Guidelines are Broken

*READ THIS* The contents of this article are outdated. Check out our Facebook Promotion Guidelines page for current info.

If you spend your day on Facebook, you probably see giveaways and contests breaking the Facebook promotion guidelines on a constant basis.

Do these sound familiar?

  • Want to win a $25 gift card? Click like on this status to enter. 1 lucky member will be chosen at 6pm!
  • Caption this photo – the one that receives the most likes wins a $100 prize pack.
  • Share this photo on your wall – we’ll randomly select a winner for an autographed version on Monday morning.

We’ve found Facebook pages with 100 fans all the way up to six million fans be in clear violation of Facebook promotion guidelines and probably come across five to ten promotions a day that we see breaking the rules. But why?

3 Reasons Facebook Promotion Guidelines Aren’t Followed

1) No One’s Knows These Guidelines Exist

The first time I ever created a Facebook page was for a business back in 2009. After a month or two, we ran a giveaway. No one knew there were guidelines. So I grabbed a gift card and asked people to invite others to the page & the person to send the most referrals wins.

And who spreads the word about these rules and regs? How do we make page owners aware? It makes you wonder what percentage of Facebook page owners have read through the page guidelines. It doesn’t help that most folks entering giveaways aren’t Facebook marketers, so they probably don’t know they’re entering a promotion that’s not compliant with Facebook (nor would they probably care too much).

So become aware. And tell your friends. We wrote a blog post last week that dissects the Facebook promotion guidelines so anyone can understand them:

2) No One Reports Pages That Are In Violation

As an entrant, do you report pages running non-compliant promotions? Do you know what the protocol would be if you wanted to?

Think from an entrant’s perspective: when you come across a giveaway that asks for a simple like or an easy comment, wouldn’t you almost rather enter the giveaway in hopes of a chance to win and be on your way vs. going to another tab, filling out an entry form, or better yet, seeking out the admin and making them aware they’re in violation?

Is a Facebook fan, a person who is already supporting the page, really going to report a brand they follow?

3) Lack Of Monitoring Resources

Whether the promotion is within the guidelines or non-compliant, there are probably  thousands of promotions created on Facebook every hour. Facebook doesn’t have the time to monitor them all.

It’s like speeding. Driving 45mph in a 35mph zone is illegal. But just as police officers don’t have the time to monitor the speeds of every car on the road, Facebook doesn’t have the bandwidth to monitor every promotion run through Facebook. At the time of this writing, Facebook has about 4,000 employees, 955M users, over 42M pages with 10 or more likes, and over 9 million connected apps.

Facebook more than likely monitors non-compliant giveaways primarily through users reporting the page for spam.

Facebook Pages Being Banned Is Rare.

If you think you’ll wake up one morning and your Facebook page is deleted, take a deep breath. Facebook isn’t out to get you… this isn’t how they operate.

There are over 42 million pages with 10 or more fans on Facebook. Try finding 10 instances of Facebook pages being banned in the last year for a promotion.

Creating controversy around banning pages without warning is not in their best interests. If Facebook bans a page for an innocent mistake of not understanding their promotion guidelines, users and page owners will hear about it. It’s not good for Facebook’s ecosystem: the more perceived risk that a page owner sees in running a promotion on Facebook, the more likely they’ll take their promotions elsewhere.

Have you been following the news story about the reporter from ‘The Independent’ having his Twitter account suspended? It didn’t take long before that story was on the front page of TechCrunch and CNN. Twitter has since apologized after realizing what had happened (or maybe realizing that it turned into a PR nightmare and the only way out was to admit their mistake).

If Everyone’s Breaking Them, Why Are These Rules In Place?

Close your eyes. Imagine you’re a Facebook executive. If there are three things that you want to do to keep all Facebook users happy, what would they be? They might look something like this:

  • Provide them a great and enriching experience
  • Protect them from spam
  • Protect their privacy

The promotion guidelines are in place for Facebook to keep control of a good user experience. Without them, your news feed would be stuffed with video contests, prizes, and sweepstakes. Facebook wants to keep your news feed from being filled with incentivized shout-outs.

And for those ‘white hat’ Facebook marketers and page owners, it’s frustrating watching other pages break the rules and accumulate more fans and engagement, isn’t it? More and more folks are becoming aware of these guidelines however, so hang in there and proudly know that you’re making the right decision to abide by the rules.

So if you’re running a promotion through Facebook and you think you might be providing folks with a poor user experience, or you fear that you might be spamming folks, or you think your users’ privacy might be in danger, you’re probably in violation of Facebook. Learn the rules, get compliant, and join the fun!

Any other reasons you might think these guidelines aren’t being followed? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

About the author

Greg Goodson

Greg Goodson is the cofounder of Rafflecopter. 25x ultramarathoner, bluegrass guitarist, & weather enthusiast. Owner of one doge.

  • Pingback: Facebook Giveaway / Contest Rules & Regulations Explained()

  • Leslie

    Clicked like on the status to enter
    Leslie

  • Brenda Penton

    I’ve looked into this in the past and couldn’t find any place to report a page that violates the Promotional Guidelines that Facebook has in place that are specific to contests and sweepstakes. Why do they even have these guidelines in place if there is no place to report anyone who is not following them?

    • There aren’t any ways that you can report a promotion that’s not compliant. What you’d have to do is report the page by going to the page itself, selecting a drop-down at the top of the page underneath the cover photo, click on report page, and finally select ‘spam or scam’.

    • Hey Brenda – they don’t make it particularly easy to report a page, and there isn’t really any way to report a page specifically for a promotion that isn’t Facebook compliant. In order to report a page, you’d have to go to the FB page, click on the drop down below the cover photo, click ‘report page’ and report it for ‘scam or spam’.

      • Brenda Penton

        Yes, I have used that method for reporting in the past but I wonder if it is only triggered if many people report it, since the Pages I have reported have not changed their entry methods. Some I have reported nearly a year ago. Since there is no place to add details when reporting it as spam/scam, I wonder how many times they often overlook any reports.

        I would prefer it if there was a specific reporting feature for Pages that are not following this guidelines or maybe even a place where I could add some details. One of these days, I hope.

        • If someone reports your page (for example) as a “scam/spam”, and it’s just one person, there’s an extremely high probability Facebook won’t bother to look at it. It’s when multiple folks report a page when Facebook starts to investigate. And even so, the page owner may never be contacted about spam reports filed against them.

          You might have better luck reaching out to the page owner and tell them that there are promotion guidelines in place and they are in violation of them. As the first reason written above, they probably don’t know they exist!

  • I greatly appreciate these blog posts, Greg!

    I also see non-compliant Facebook giveaways submitted to my site for promotion on a daily basis. I try to monitor them and do my part by informing the host — by sending them the link to the Promotions Guidelines (and recently, your post on Facebook Giveaway Rules & Regulations Explained). Most of the time they’re appreciative and they really were just unaware.

    All of the non-compliant Facebook giveaways actually make it harder for me to promote regular giveaways on Facebook. When I post about a giveaway (with a link for people to click & enter and big words that say “CLICK THIS LINK TO ENTER”) people still think that they just have to like, share and comment and they are magically entered! It’s a challenge for sure, but we’re making progress!

    • Thanks Bridget – glad you found the article helpful!

      I think if everyone does their part by sharing what you can and cannot do when it comes to FB promotions, we’ll start seeing more and more pages become compliant. Of course, 42 million pages have 10 or more likes… not all of them are running promotions, but all of them have the potential to (and that’s a lot of pages!) :P

  • What is the difference between “an automatic entry for being a fan” and “like this page for an entry to win.” It just makes the same exact thing harder for users and for companies running a giveaway.

    In addition, I don’t understand the guideline that you can’t give people an automatic entry for sharing. If people look at the share as spam, they’ll just forgo that entry. I’ve found that most people like to share and it is nice to give them something of value for doing so.

    • From my experience, shares on Facebook really aren’t worth a lot. If shares were an entry method, someone could easily claim an entry for sharing something on Facebook, but use the setting where the share is viewable only to them. So you might end up giving 50 people entries for sharing something with themselves on Facebook.

      • So far, shares have been extremely valuable.

    • Bridget’s correct in that ‘sharing’ isn’t what is ultimately valuable. You could have 2 friends on Facebook, and if you ‘share’ with them, that’s not nearly as valuable to those who have 300+ friends. What’s valuable to the admin running the promotion are the folks who learn about the promotion through a share who then decide to interact with the promotion in some way. That’s why Facebook does “allow for referral-based rewards where our Social Channels are indirectly tied to the potential in-app reward”:

      http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/policy/examples_and_explanations/Rewarding_Users/

      In addition to that, it would be more difficult to moderate ‘share’ entries, especially if the individual had their Facebook privacy settings to where you wouldn’t be able to see if they shared or not.

      • I like the referral based reward. One way to moderate a share would be to see if the link they sent was ever clicked.

  • Pingback: Podcast: Ins and Outs of Online Giveaways & Sweepstakes()

  • I’ve started clicking the “report” button after reading your article last week. I’m hoping at the very least Facebook will find time to tell these culprits what they’re doing wrong.

    • Unfortunately, FB is not reaching out. They are simply shutting down. Look at what happened to Giveaway Promote’s original fan page.

  • jaydot

    Is it against Facebook policy to ask fans for personal info if they have left comments or direct messages about bring back a flavors of a product that you once had. For a giveaway of a free sample of the product that is coming back?

  • That’s why it’s good to actually read before checking the box that you’ve read the guidelines!

  • Charlie Solano

    Such things should not take place on social media platform but businesses or brand show some exciting offers to get more visitors. this has become a trend now in social media.

    –

    Mylife.com refunds

  • Pingback: Facebook Guidelines – Does anyone listen? | Thoughts along the road...()