Social media, especially Facebook is a fantastic place to grow your business. One way of reaching more people on Facebook that has grown in popularity recently is “Like & Share” competitions. Surely there’s nothing wrong with this way of trying to reach people?
Well, unfortunately there is. Facebook, at least on their terms of service and values page take a dim view of these competitions if not done correctly. “Like & Share” competitions as we know them pretty much all go against these terms of service. But why?
Over the years competitions on Facebook have changed drastically, originally they were only allowed to be administered through apps. Which were mostly clunky and very temperamental. Luckily, Facebook changed this rule to allow competitions to take place on page timelines.
That brings us to today and how competitions take place today. Usually the post describes the prize on offer then tells the user to like the post and share it to be entered in the competition.
The above competition actually goes against Facebook’s rules. You cannot use post likes and post shares as an “entry fee” to a competition. The reason why is quite simple.
The way the Facebook algorithm works determines how well your posts do organically depending on how well previous posts have done organically. E.g. If past posts have lots of engagements, future posts will be shown to more people. So Facebook looks at these “engagement baiting” competitions as a way to cheat the system.
Of course, as with most things in life, there is a way to work around this rule. Instead of using engagements as an entry fee, you can just ask a very simple question, then use the list of comments to pick a prize winner. Or another option is to create a poll and use the engagement buttons to cast a vote. Facebook allows the like, love, haha, angry and sad buttons to be used to cast votes.
Although this can be seen as a bit of a nonsense rule, Facebook does have it’s reasons so it is just best to abide by the rules instead of running the risk of either having the post deleted or even having your page suspended!
If you were unaware of this rule of Facebook, get in touch with Socially today and we can guide you through the management of your campaigns to make sure everything is above board and Facebook legal.
