Facebook Fan Pages - Promotions and Competitions

We have observed with great interest the reaction from Facebook fanpage owners to the recent changes to how you can use Facebook fanpages as a promotion and competition tool. Some of our clients are directly impacted by these changes and others are ahead of the game.

To recap, Facebook have banned all forms of competitions, giveaways, sweepstakes etc from a Facebook fanpage.  For the Irish and UK Facebook market, this is a big deal. A Facebook fanpage will be the most important place for a lot of consumer brands going forward. User engagement and interaction on a Facebook fanpage is THE metric of success and brand engagement. To date, most brands have driven this type of promotion by posting competitions to their fanpages.  Typically, these promotions / user interaction tools have taken the form of something along the lines of: “the 1000th fan to tag themselves in this photo” or “what are you looking forward to most this xmas”  or “the person who gets the most likes on a photo that they tagged themselves in”, etc.

Facebook fanpage owners cannot run such promos anymore unless the promotions are put through a dedicated application. In turn, this application needs to be approved by Facebook.

The new state of play means that a Facebook fanpage can promote competitions and promotions on its page, but it cannot administer the promo or competition from its page. It must administer the promo or competition through  a dedicated app and users / fans are only allowed to enter the competition directly in the app.

This is happening because of the huge increase in spam from some fanpages/applications. So, in order to fix this problem, Facebook have essentially decided to regulate the whole area of promos. The key output of a promo is normally some form of messaging, posting to users news feeds or fan page wall update. If the source of the output is spam, then this spam gets a lot of impact.

Yet, the key attractions for brands to have a substantial presence on Facebook is to leverage this messaging/ news feed capability.  Therefore, if you have something genuine and relevant for fans, then a brand is fully entitled to tap into the news feed platform. The only change is that you need to get sign off in advance. This is a good thing.  By filtering out spam and putting the focus on quality engagement, then the cut through value of Facebook messaging increases dramatically for quality brands with a quality Facebook strategy.

It is Betapond’s view that bespoke applications actually give better news feed, wall updates and notification choice and impact, once the application actually offers something of value to the user.

Whilst the normal promos are nice to have and show good results, the world of brand engagement on Facebook has more to offer.

The Facebook fanpage is the number one public face of a brand.  How do you interact with your fans in the real / traditional world? Can that interaction by mapped to Facebook? Don’t restrict your creative thinking. There are no restrictions on what can achieved through Facebook from a digital interaction perspective. Do not treat it as a micro site. This is part of your core social media presence for the foreseeable future.

Think big; think long term.  In the USA a brand’s Facebook fanpage is now the most strategic marketing challenge for the next two years. You can’t build long term relationships by just offering the normal suite of tag this, comment on that. That’s baby steps. With Proctor and Gamble leading the charge into more meaningful relationships on Facebook, 2010 should be a interesting year.

Declan