Timeline Contests Break Facebook’s Rules!

11 Monday May 2015

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices, Facebook

Tags

Behavior, Best Practices, Community Management, contests

I’ve been keeping an eye on my news feed (as you’ll recall, I’ve liked over 4000 pages & counting) in hopes of finding lots of good & bad examples of contests being run since the rule change.

Honestly speaking, I’m not seeing as many contests as I’d expected.

This is probably because most of the pages I’ve Liked are larger company pages — and not small local pages.

In my opinion, contests on Facebook tend to work best with smaller, local pages — and maybe also with personality type pages, like music bands.

In any case, here are 3 examples of Timeline contests that violate the new Facebook Promotion Guidelines.

1. Tag To Win

According to Facebook’s Promotion guidelines :

In order to maintain the accuracy of Page content, our Pages Terms now prohibit Pages from tagging or encouraging people to tag themselves in content that they are not actually depicted in. So, for instance:

It’s OK to ask people to submit names of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize

It’s not OK to ask people tag themselves in pictures of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize

But time & time again I see pages (even after Facebook made the new guidelines) clearly instructing their fans to tag themselves in a photo to enter a contest.

An example of this is on the Nature’s Bakery page:

This is a clear violation of the Facebook Page Guidelines — but as you can see, 108 people Liked the post & there are 126 comments.

So you can see why doing this kind of contest is tempting.

2. Share To Win

I see this one much more often than the “Tag to Win” contest.

Our friends at Nature’s Bakery appear to be offenders on this type of contest as well:

What do the Facebook Guidelines say?

Promotions may be administered on Pages or within apps on Facebook. Personal Timelines must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries” is not permitted).

Translation: Page owners can encourage users to share the contest & come vote — by Liking their comment on a contest — but sharing cannot be a form of entering the contest.

Looks like 144 people helped Nature’s Bakery violate the rules!

Just so you don’t think I’m picking on Nature’s Bakery, here’s another offender (Lake Tahoe North) that collected 176 shares:

3. Upload Cover Photo to Win

This is an old trick I’ve seen many page owners use over the years:

Load a great cover photo promoting your product or event
Encourage fans to upload it as their cover photo for a chance to win something

Is this against the Facebook Guidelines?

Let’s see:

All covers are public. This means that anyone who visits your Page will be able to see your cover. Covers can’t be deceptive, misleading, or infringe on anyone else’s copyright. You may not encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines.

Yep, seems like it’s against the guidelines to me!

Even if you aren’t doing it as a contest, encouraging fans to load your cover as theirs for exposure is a no-no.

Here’s an example from a band, Fresh Bakin, who recently asked fans to load their cover photo to win tickets:

There is no way of knowing how many fans actually uploaded the cover — but it does appear 91 people Liked the image, which was part of the “rules” for their contest.

Legit Facebook Timeline Contests

Don’t get me wrong here — if you want to run a contest on your timeline, then go for it!

Just make sure you follow the Facebook Guidelines.

Promotions

1. If you use Facebook to communicate or administer a promotion (ex: a contest or sweepstakes), you are responsible for the lawful operation of that promotion, including:

a.   The official rules;

b.   Offer terms and eligibility requirements (ex: age and residency restrictions); and

c.   Compliance with applicable rules and regulations governing the promotion and all prizes offered (ex: registration and obtaining necessary regulatory approvals)

2. Promotions on Facebook must include the following:

a.   A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant.

b.   Acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.

3. Promotions may be administered on Pages or within apps on Facebook. Personal Timelines must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries” is not permitted).

4. We will not assist you in the administration of your promotion, and you agree that if you use our service to administer your promotion, you do so at your own risk.

In other words, you can require fans to enter your Timeline contest by:

Liking a post
Commenting on a post
Liking & Commenting a post
Posting on the Page’s timeline
Sending a Message
Having the comment with the most Likes

It’s very tempting to run contests that involve sharing, tagging & uploading your cover photo — but don’t do it.

And obviously you can still use 3rd party apps to run your contest.

You’ll need to weigh the options of whether you run a Facebook Timeline contest or use a 3rd party app — that’s your call.

How To Market A Social Media Contest:

06 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices, Facebook, Google+, LInkedIn, Marketing, Multi Channel Marketing, Online Marketing, Pinterest, Twitter

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Best Practices, contests, Facebook, Marketing, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, Online Marketing, sweepstakes

Social media contests are a great way to connect with consumers in the ever evolving web. Social networks are natural venues for users to share information quickly. Since I am a big fan of giving real world examples whenever I explain a specific tactic, I wanted to highlight a contest I found recently. I’ll walk you through how I would go about promoting it and how I might actually do it differently.

I would like to point out a few things here about this contest – first of all, they are not a client of Ignite Social Media and secondly, I don’t know what they’ve done to promote it so far.

Beneful Most Incredible Small Dog YouTube Video Contest

Before I get into promotion tactics I have to point out something that is extremely important, but that a lot of companies don’t do well.

Put Appropriate Keywords In Your Contest Name

If you implement a contest properly, people will be linking to your site. 9/10 times people will use your contest title as the anchor text, so make sure you take advantage of a well-thought-out contest title before you even start thinking about promotion.

In this example I would have used the following contest title: Beneful Dog Food YouTube Video Contest. Ranking for “Incredible Small Dog” is probably not going to amount to many sales of the Beneful dog food product line.

Host The Contest On Your Site

For the Small Dog Video Contest we are dealing with YouTube as the means for entry. As someone who understands the power of search, I am never a fan of hosting linkable assets off of my main site. It is also worth pointing that hosting a custom channel like they have rolled out on Youtube is not cheap. More often than not contests are very linkable. As I will outline later on it is relatively easy to drum up some press for your contest, and more than likely they will link to the destination of the contest, where it is hosted on your site.

I suggest hosting the contest on your site, and leveraging tags to aggregate YouTube videos.

That way, contestants are still using YouTube, which is widely established as the de facto video hosting source, and people are familiar with the interface.

Find People To Enter The Contest

Now that I have those two main issues out of the way, let’s explore how one might actually promote the contest. This can be the toughest aspect of contest marketing in my opinion, especially because videos have a high barrier of entry. That’s because videos are not easy to make and share when compared to other forms of online content creation.

Using the example above, we can utilize custom search queries inside of Google to help us identify dog owners who have channels on YouTube. This will help us target individuals who we know have created dog videos in the past. Then through some additional social searching we can identify some form of outreach, whether that is via email or other means, to let them know about the contest.

Submit Your Contest To Social Media Contest Sites

There are several well-known and emerging sources in the giveaway and contest market that are worth submitting your contest to. These sites will help you get additional coverage and should help drive entries into your contest, which is very important, after all. Below is a list in no particular order:

Summary

Contests are being widely adopted by many big brands currently and are the sort of tactic that even small to mid-sized businesses can implement with success. Since there is an influx of so many contests in the market, however, it can be difficult to cut through the similarities. Approaching contest marketing from the angles outlined above will help ensure success for your campaign. Do you have any additional tips to add? Have you run a successful social media contest?

4-best-practices-for-choosing-a-facebook-contest-winner

01 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Best Practices, contests, Facebook, Social Media

Love, love, love those peeps over at ShortStack. Here is yet another reason to love them.

All good things must come to an end. However, when a Facebook contest is over, there’s still some work to be done. Job #1: picking a winner! There are some important steps to take to ensure that your selection process meets Facebook guidelines and doesn’t have any of your entrants crying “foul!”

Here are 4 best practices to keep in mind when choosing a Facebook contest winner.

#1: Keep it fair

Before you announce your contest, write some rules and regulations for the promotion. Facebook has a plethora of guidelines you must follow but there is one unwritten rule that we always include in our contest regulations: we tell our users how we will select a winner.

There are a few things that we’ve learned work well:

The more transparent and specific you are with your fans the better. Whether you plan on having a panel of judges, one judge, or a tool that randomly selects a winner, be sure to explain in full detail how a winner will be selected.

Include any details that will go into the winner-selection process. For example, if you’re running a photo contest and you plan to judge based on picture relevance, creativity, or lighting, be sure to include these criteria in your rules.

Disclose how you will contact the winner and the guidelines that go along with the selection process. When we select contest winners we first notify them by email and then give them between 15-30 days to confirm that they received the email notification. If we don’t receive the confirmation, we move on to the next winner. This is an example of the type of information to include in your rules and regulations.

Don’t forget to include that you (the contest sponsor) have the right to change the winner selection at any point in time, just in case you run into any hiccups along the way.

Here is an example of the Winner Selection portion of the rules for a recent contest we ran:

*this is just a sample of our rules and regulations. Please check with local and state laws and a legal counsel before creating your own rules and regulations for Facebook contests.

WINNER SELECTION
All eligible entries received during the Submission Period will be gathered into a database at the end of the Contest Period. A winner will be selected by a panel of judges and will be based on creativity. Sponsors reserve the right to change the winner selection method at its sole discretion.

Announcement that an entrant was selected will be sent to the email address supplied on the contest entry form. Each entrant is responsible for monitoring his or her email account for notification and receipt or other communications related to this contest. The winners will be announced by October 5, 2012 on or about noon PST.

PRIZE:
One ShortStack t-shirt
One ShortStack mug
Variety of ShortStack stickers

Winner will receive the allotted prize within 30 days of notification. An announcement that an entrant will be receiving a prize will be sent to the email address supplied on the potential prize winner’s entry form. Each entrant is responsible for monitoring his or her email account for notification and receipt or other communications related to this contest. If a potential prize winner cannot be reached by Administrator (or Sponsor) within fifteen (15) days using the contact information provided at the time of entry, that potential prize winner shall forfeit the prize. Upon the request of the Sponsor, the potential winner may be required to return an Affidavit of Eligibility, Release and Prize Acceptance Form and IRS W-9 form. If a potential winner fails to comply with these official rules, that potential winner will be disqualified.

Terms and conditions may apply. Incidental expenses and all other costs and expenses which are not specifically listed as part of a prize in these Official Rules and which may be associated with the award, acceptance, receipt and use of all or any portion of the awarded prize are solely the responsibility of the respective prize winner. ALL FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL TAXES ASSOCIATED WITH THE RECEIPT OR USE OF ANY PRIZE IS SOLELY THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE WINNER.

#2: Decide how you will select a winner

When it comes to selecting a winner, you have a few options depending on the type of promotion you’re running. If you’re running a voting contest where the person with the most votes wins, there’s not much you need to do. However, you should be aware that even if the prize isn’t especially valuable, people will try to game the system. To prevent voting fraud, we recommend setting up the contest so that you pull the top five or 10 entries with the most votes and then randomly choose the winner from that smaller pool using a “random winner picker” tool (details below).

Non-vote contests will require you to select a winner yourself and there are a few ways to go about it.

If you’re running a contest that has a long list of judging criteria you will have to sit down with your team and separate the ones that meet the criteria from those that don’t. From there your team can choose a winner, or you can use a random entry picker tool — we have such a tool in our database system to make it easy to select a winner. You can choose between one and 25 winners, filter entries, allow the same entry to be chosen more than once, and give an extra chance to win to those who have shared the contest with their friends. To learn more about ShortStack’s random entry picker tool visit here.

If you’re interested in being transparent about picking a winner, try videotaping your winner selection process. You can see an example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoLlMTcSvEM.

We thought this was pretty cool, it gives fans a firsthand look at how you select your winner so they know they didn’t get cheated in any way.

#3: Follow Facebook guidelines about informing the winner

Facebook has very specific rules and guidelines about how to announce a winner and you’ll want to be sure to follow the rules. The main thing to remember is that you are not allowed to notify winners through Facebook. This includes using any Facebook feature such as Facebook messages, chat, posts on Timelines or Pages.

You must notify the winners outside of Facebook first and once they have confirmed that they’ve received your notification you can announce on Facebook who won your contest.

We also recommend notifying all of the entrants who didn’t win. A short email to all entrants thanking them for their entries and letting them know someone else has won shows that you’re actually looking at entries and you appreciate your fans engagement with your Facebook Page.

#4: Upgrade your app

Just because a contest is over, doesn’t mean your app should be forgotten. It’s important to remember that a link to that contest is still out and about in the public eye so we always recommend updating your app with a note that lets your fans know that the contest has ended. If appropriate, put in the name of the winner and the contest entry so your fans and other entrants can see who won. Here is an example of a contest we ran awhile back (it has since ended):http://guessjimsmood.pgtb.me/dl5czz.

You can always delete an old contest app, but we recommend updating it and keeping it published for a few weeks after the contest.

Following these best practices will ensure that you don’t have entrants complaining about you choosing a winner unfairly. We’d love to know what has worked — and what hasn’t — for your contests. Let us know @shortstacklab.

– See more at: http://www.sociallystacked.com/2013/02/4-best-practices-for-choosing-a-facebook-contest-winner/#sthash.v2cTxARr.dpuf

leonidesignoryblog

~ socially savvy design

Tag Archives: contests