What we need to know NOW about Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines! (this is good news)
October 3rd, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing
Promotions through Facebook are going to get a whole lot more popular! On Aug 27th, when I was relishing the last few days of a sunny summer, Facebook changed its promotional guidelines that now makes it easier and potentially a whole lot less expensive (!!) for companies to run promotions through their Facebook pages!
On Aug 27th, an age old rule that allowed companies to run promotions only through a third party app was scraped and instead, now companies can run contests on their pages! So, now posting a status and asking its audience to “like” or comment on the post for a chance to win is allowed. This, in my opinion, is huge! Not only can small business now stop relying on the expensive third party developers to run their Facebook promotions, but with incentivising users to like their posts to win, there is a potential that a status update can now become viral or gain a lot of traction. Also, by asking customers to post their entries for contests on the page itself, you are earning content that is curated by the customers and is generally positive.
You still cannot however ask a consumer to tag a picture of themselves with the product to win. So while there are still a few rules in place, the playing field has now become a lot fairer for small businesses who early could not legally run promotions due to a lack of resources to hire a third party developer. Also, it is simpler for companies to run ads as well directly on their page. And finally, this relates to my previous post about brand consistency and the ensuing credibility and trust – many third party ad developers have an interface that is different than that of the brand and this inconsistency can lead to dramatically less customer engagement.
So will this be the end of third party apps? Shortstack CEO Jim Belosic certainly doesn’t think so and says that the merit of the third party apps lie in their ability to not only collect data but also leverage it for use in continuing marketing promotions. But at the end of the day, the biggest winner is Facebook itself which will undoubtedly see companies competitively create content on their news feeds to attract eyeballs and thereby greater consumer engagement.
One challenge though- Facebook shows only 500 likes for a post at a time so if a small pizza parlour runs a contest and gets 20000 likes and needs to choose one winner from all the likes submitted, how will the shop do this equitably? Is there any potential for consumer dissatisfaction?
Sources:
http://bit.ly/15Kl0k9
http://on.fb.me/182byF1