The guidelines in a nutshell:
All promotions (e.g. contests) must run through a Facebook App .
Any Facebook signature features such as 'liking', 'sharing', 'checking in', 'posting' and installing/connecting to your app may not be used as a registration for participation .
You are also not allowed to use these functions as a way to vote or to determine a winner. 'Like & Win' actions are therefore out of the question , as are 'the reaction with the most likes wins' etc. Personally, I have never seen any repercussions from Facebook.
Facebook may not be used to contact winners (including chat, email, messages, wall posts and comments)
You may not use Facebook's name, trademarks, copyrights or other intellectual property in connection with the promotion. In fact, you may only use Facebook's name in the rules and other information surrounding the promotion if this is strictly necessary to comply with the other terms.
In the promotion (on the entry form/landing page) you must include at least the following 'disclaimers':
Acknowledgement that Facebook does not endorse, administer or is otherwise associated with the promotion in any way.
Acknowledge that participants are providing information to your business and not to Facebook.
The Benefits of a Facebook App
As you may have read in the promotion rules, it is mandatory to run Facebook promotions via a Facebook app. This also brings the following important advantages:
You can present the campaign in your own house style ;
The action and objectives can be made more measurable by, for example, implementing Google Analytics in the app;
When users install the app, an authorization screen may ask for a wealth of user information and permissions . Limit this to what is necessary for the app and the campaign. Asking for too many permissions is a deterrent and creates a high number of 'bouncers'
By using OpenGraph functions in your app, user actions are automatically translated to the participant's 'News Feed', 'Ticker' and 'Timeline'. This ensures that your action is also visible to his/her friends. This increases your reach
and therefore your chances of a successful campaign !
Using 'Social Channels' functions , participants can easily post messages directly from the app to the Timeline of friends or themselves and invite friends to participate in the promotion via a 'Request', for example.
An App on your page with 'Tabs'
In promotions, it is generally common to place the landing page of your app, or even the entire app, within the context of your fan page in a so-called 'Page Tab'. These are the tabs on your fan page, of which 'photos' is one (see the illustration below). As the administrator of the page, you can add tabs and also adjust the order of the tabs in the tab navigation (see red square). A page tab is 810px wide and can therefore not accommodate apps that are wider.
Brandforge Facebook page
It is possible to redirect the user from the page tab to the full-width app environment of Facebook, which adapts (fluidly) to the width of the browser screen of the user. Larger brands in particular usually use this environment for Facebook campaigns to create an even more 'branded experience'. However, most standard Facebook campaign tools that you can buy or that are available for free do not offer this possibility.
Facebook is a platform that ultimately revolves around a network of connections and conversations between almost 1 billion people. With Apps, Facebook literally gives you the key to the so-called 'Core Concepts' (Dialogs, OpenGraph etc.) of this hyper-connected web, in order to maximize the reach and success of your action.
Technically, as a campaign creator, you become the creator of a new user experience on canada telegram data Facebook. People log into Facebook for mostly social reasons, so your campaign experience should be (mostly) about this: giving people from your target audience an engaging experience and encouraging them in a fun way to introduce your campaign/brand to their friends. When you want to create a Facebook campaign, this is all you should want.
But the campaign should actually yield something for your company? Of course, and that is precisely why I also point out the fact that Facebook marketing is unique because of the potential of friend networks . The most effective form of marketing is namely the recommendation of a friend or word of mouth advertising. No less than 92% say they trust recommendations from friends (according to research by Nielsen , see image below)! Wouldn't it be great if your campaign played into this? In addition, campaigns with a strong incentive to involve friends (for example to vote for a participant) also provide free traffic (earned media).
advertising brand trust 2012Please note that actions such as inviting friends or posting something to your own Timeline (and therefore also to your friends' news feed) are always voluntary. These are therefore voluntary campaign elements and there should always be a good incentive for the participant before he/she will use them.
In the next and final article in this series about Facebook campaigns via ads and apps , I will review several free and paid promotion apps for Facebook (with CMS) and discuss a number of inspiring Facebook cases, which were realized with custom campaign apps.