In last one month, there has been a major development on Facebook. Brand pages in India have found their page disappear without any notice. Brands like Pizza Hut India, FCUK India, Cadbury Bournvillie and few others went missing for quite some time from Facebook. Apparently, the pages were not confirming to the promotion guidelines as stated by Facebook.

Not only has this made everyone sit up and go over their own pages, it has also highlighted the need to have the right people handling the brand pages. This incident is another instance which will necessitate companies to engage with established social media partners to manage their brands. As a continuous process of educating right social media, we bring to you the Facebook guidelines that the brands have to follow from here on, at least for now.

Simply Put

In its current format, the Facebook promotion guidelines simply bar any page to run a promotion campaign where you wish to select a winner via its page or the wall. This means brands are not allowed to collect entries in form of picture, videos or comments, conduct a draw, judge entries or notify winners through its mechanisms.

Avoid

In order to administer any kind of contest, you have to use an application or risk having Facebook come down on you. While liking the page and restricting the contest to the fans of the page is allowed, liking the contest entry or making it the only criteria to select a winner is not.

Ginger Hotel Contest Application

Nor can a winner be selected randomly to be given a prize, without any show of talent or ability. That would imply administrating a sweepstake, which is not allowed by Facebook. You cannot have a contest running which would make a purchase of a product a necessity to participate in a contest either.

A Sweepstake is not allowed

Also, you cannot contact winners inside Facebook at all—via email, chat or posting on their wall—nor can you post winners on your page wall. What you can do though is, select a fan at random and feature him or her in your page photo. Or possibly feature chosen fan(s) on a custom tab (link). As long as you don’t have other fans vote or submit nominations, etc. A good example of this is the current Toys R Us tab.

Featured Fan Profile Picture and Tab

Any predefined application of Facebook can also not be used for administrating any contest. This would mean, you cannot ask people to upload photos to a page album. You can have a photo gallery contest administered via a third party application.

Utilize

You CAN, although, provide a giveaway and even collect names and emails from fans and visitors to your page via a third party application and can be used develop an email management system. You can also use a piece of “fan only” reveal code to give away a coupon code or special gift to everyone who likes your page.

While it may seem that Facebook cannot possibly check each and every page to see if they adhere to promotion guidelines, it is not a risk worth taking. If the page does get pulled down, the PR disaster it will create is way greater than anything a brand would gain by flouting these guidelines.

Focus

Also, as much as people would like to believe that Facebook is trying to bully brands or promote application developers, this whole episode should only be seen as a reminder that promotions on Facebook is not about gaining numbers but building relationships via engagement, just like Facebook would want us to believe.

It also points to a more serious question of who should be allowed to handle the image of a brand like FCUK and other brands that suffered. People who are not aware of promotion guidelines, rules and regulations, agencies that pop up like wild mushrooms would only cause more grief.

A proper structure utilization and knowledge of the platform is a must for anyone handling the page. This is the time that the so called experts of social media will be separated from those who truly are evolving along with Facebook.