Comments on: The Reality of Facebook Promotions

By: Virtel Marketing – 10 Things Everyone Should Know When Starting a Social Media Promotion

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:04:20 +0000

[...] Falls ran a promotion for CafePress. He shared his experience in an article for Social Media Explorer. The article is a great read and pretty short. Here are some interesting stats he saw during [...]

By: Debra Zimmer

Debra Zimmer — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:49:00 +0000

Thanks so much for writing this. It’s not often someone shares real numbers. I forwarded to my team/clients so they could understand how the numbers play out.

By: Social Ninja

Social Ninja — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:25:00 +0000

you are right about the third party bit but the core FB policies apply to third parties as well. In this case they clearly violated the following:
1) Share-and-win construct is not allowed. That’s a violation of policy rule IV.1 which says “You must not incentivize users to use (or gate content behind the use of) Facebook social channels, or imply that an incentive is directly tied to the use of our channels.”. This is as clear as it gets.
2) They were on the borderline for IV.3 unless they showed exactly what content was being posted on user’s behalf and gave users a way to opt out of that.

This is just for the benefit of the readers. Feel free to derive your own interpretation.

By: The Big List – All The Resources You Need to Answer Your Facebook Marketing Questions | PostRocket Blog

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:38:52 +0000

[...] The Reality of Facebook Promotions via SocialMediaExplorer.com [...]

By: Hisocial

Hisocial — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:43:00 +0000

Let me add one tip. It’s important when you run a promo, to promote it across several platforms, do not limit yourself to Twitter or Faceboo, use both, also use your website to get participants.

By: Hisocial

Hisocial — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:41:00 +0000

Let me add

By: JasonFalls

JasonFalls — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 01:35:00 +0000

I’m afraid you’re mistaken. The third party applications that are approved, and Social Annex is one, have special authorization and approval from Facebook. If not, no one would ever be able to run contests. We work directly with Facebook as well, so we’re clear and confident in our approach.

By: Social Ninja

Social Ninja — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:55:00 +0000

Not quite true Jason. Here’s a link to Facebook policies which states that you can’t attach an incentive for sharing on Facebook. Looks like this app required users to share this contest on Facebook in order to enter the contest which is against the policy. It doesn’t matter whether or not you are using a third party service. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/policy/examples_and_explanations/Rewarding_Users/
Looks like this SocialAnnex contest was in clear violation of Facebook policies.

By: JasonFalls

JasonFalls — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:36:00 +0000

You’re not wrong. You do need to go through a third-party application. We used Social Annex for this particular promotion.

By: Tanya Andryushko

Tanya Andryushko — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:21:00 +0000

Reallty interesting article, thanks. But I always wonder is not against the rules a Share-And-Win promotion construct? As far as I know, one of Facebook’s rules for pages is that if they are going to run a contest, it has to be done through a third-party application, such as OfferPop, Wildfire or EasyPromos, am I wrong?

By: JasonFalls

JasonFalls — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 02:55:00 +0000

Sure Dianne. A registered third party application is a company that goes through a screening process with their software to get approval from Facebook that they aren’t up to something suspicious. So social media management systems, promotional tools, etc., fall into these categories. Some examples would be Social Annex (which we use at CafePress), ShopSocially (which we also use), WildfireApp, OfferPop, Expion, Vitrue … even some lower-market tools like HootSuite and such have the ability. Some may or may not have the actual features to run promotions, though.

For the record, I’ve used WildfireApp before to run a video contest. It was fairly reasonably priced. The others, I don’t know as well. Social Annex and Shop Socially, which I do know, are not what I’d classify as small business solutions.