How to Make Sure your Promotion is Within Facebook’s Guidelines

A common question that we hear from our customers is: “How do I make sure my campaign is playing within the rules of Facebook Promotional Guidelines?”. We wrote a blog post about the new Facebook promotions guidelines when they came out in November but we want to use this new post to further clarify Facebook’s policy and how Wildfire can ensure that your contest or sweepstakes is always Facebook friendly.

While the full text for Facebook’s promotional guidelines can be found here, there is one point which is important to underline and understand. The guidelines state that you cannot “administer” a contest or sweepstakes on Facebook without Facebook’s written consent but you can “publicize” a promotion without approval. “Administering” refers to the collection of user data (e.g. when a user fills out an entry form) and/or the drawing or notifying of winners. “Publicizing” your promotion means that you display and promote your promotion within Facebook (e.g. on your Fan Page) but you do not collect user data or draw/notify winners within Facebook.

A promotion can thus be handled in two ways. Anybody can “publicize” their promotion within Facebok e.g. by displaying it on their Fan Page, promoting it via status updates, or by inviting friends to participate. However, only companies that obtain approval from their Facebook sales rep can have their promotions run entirely within Facebook. If you do not have a dedicated Facebook representative, a portion of your promotion (i.e. the collecting of user data and drawing/notifying of winners) needs to occur outside of Facebook.

You can create a fun, compelling, interactive sweepstakes or contest and have it live right in your Facebook Fan Page, which is completely fine within Facebook’s Promotional Guidelines. However, when the user goes to submit their information (which is called “administration” in the guidelines) without prior Facebook approval this step will occur outside of Facebook, in a microsite the user will be automatically and seamlessly guided to. This is a service Wildfire provides for all sweepstakes and contests automatically!

If you run a promotion via Wildfire we automatically solve this problem for you. We enable you to easily add a sweepstakes or contest to your Facebook fan page (without needing Facebook approval) but at the point that an entrant needs to submit their personal data (via the sweepstakes or contest entry form) he is auto-redirected to a microsite outside of Facebook where he leaves all of his data submissions. In terms of design, this site looks identical to your promotion design in Facebook, so the movement between sites is seamless and the user will usually not notice that he has momentarily been taken outside of Facebook. Finally, when he is done submitting his data and clicks “Submit,” he will be seamlessly re-directed by Wildfire right back into your Fan Page on Facebook.

This is just one of the ways that we ensure that your promotions are Facebook-compliant. In addition to this, we also automatically include in your promotion the appropriate disclaimers and footnotes required by Facebook, we automatically exclude language that’s disallowed by Facebook and we guide you to ensure that you are not offering a forbidden prize. For more details about Facebook’s promotions guidelines and how we help to guide you, check out our previous post:http://help.wildfireapp.com/faqs/frequently-asked-questions/facebook-promotions-guidelines-explanation