Facebook giveaways are great, aren’t they? They’re usually pretty simple and straight forward. Utah Valley Moms loves to run Facebook giveaways, but we’ve also expanded to the blog and also to Instagram. We’ve moved on because of how Facebook continues to make it harder to get information out to followers but also because of the rules that go along with running a giveaway on Facebook. While we’re grateful for the changes, it’s also hard to follow the rules while watching many other companies go against the rules and get away with it (a few years ago, our Facebook got shut down due to promoting another company who went against Facebook’s guidelines so we just can’t risk it again).

Here’s some of the rules we’ve found:

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.

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 and friend connections 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”, and “tag your friends in this post to enter” are not permitted).
Now, promotions may be administered on Page Timelines and in apps on Facebook. For example, businesses can now:
  • Collect entries by having users post on the Page or comment/like a Page post
  • Collect entries by having users message the Page
  • Utilize likes as a voting mechanism
As before, however, businesses cannot administer promotions on personal Timelines.
So what is this all telling us?
  1. You shouldn’t have to share a post to get an entry into a giveaway.
  2. You shouldn’t have to tag a friend to get an entry into a giveaway.
  3. You shouldn’t have to like a page to get an entry into a giveaway.

Now what? Well, you can still enter the giveaways. Or you can kindly guide pages to these links from Facebook that talk about giveaway rules. (Note, some are a couple years old and Facebook changes constantly so by the time you read these, it may be out-of-date.)

https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2014/08/07/Graph-API-v2.1/
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/page-promotions-terms

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