*READ THIS* The contents of this article, written in 2014, could be outdated. Check out our Facebook Promotion Guidelines page for current info.

Back in early August, Facebook announced several updates on their developer blog including an update to their platform policy that affects third-party apps built on their platform. If you haven’t already, read Facebook’s official blog about the changes and the following discussion here.

We blogged in-depth about these Facebook platform policy updates in a previous post where we discussed what these updates meant, how they’ll affect Rafflecopter, why the changes were being put into place, and what to expect moving forward (Update 11/15 – read about recent updates pertaining to fan-gating here). We’d like to take this time and discuss how these updates will affect Facebook & Rafflecopter alike, and more importantly give you a timeline in which changes to our app will be implemented so you can plan your holiday promotions accordingly.

*READ THIS* It’s possible the contents of this article, written in 2014, are outdated. Check out our Facebook Promotion Guidelines page for all current info.

Last week, Facebook published a blog post on their developer blog bringing attention to their Graph API v2.1 and several other changes, but more importantly, they announced an update to their platform policy that affects third-party apps built on their platform. This new policy Facebook has put into place reads as follows:

You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app’s Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.

You can read the full post about the changes and the following discussion here. In the past, you’d probably expect to read about updates surrounding promotions on Facebook through the page guidelines doc, but this update was specific to app creators that create software which integrates with Facebook. If you’re not an app developer, this update may have caught you off guard.