This is old news, guys. Zynga et al exploited a weakness in the app ecosystem to drive massive volumes in their early days, through essentially spamming the walls of it’s users, but Facebook closed the loop a couple of years ago.

Since then, innate FB functions such as likes or comments could not form part of a game or competition mechanic. Check-ins is a new one though.

In a nutshell, promotions can’t trigger ‘social actions’ in people’s newsfeeds. My view as to why is that by blocking this behaviour, significant additional spend is required to drive traffic to an app or a promotion.

The use of a ‘Facebook mechanism’ has been banned for ages as a means of entering a competition but it is still done all over the place. Has anyone seen any brand get banned for this? I can’t name one.

The number of pages that run a ‘Like us to enter’ and ‘Like to win an iPad’ is huge!

People will continue to do it as Facebook are taking action on very few that do it. I advise clients of the guidelines, but should they plod along while competitors build up likes? I do point out though, that often these likes aren’t as targeted and valuable as those they’d get from a properly planned out and well run competition or other type of campaign.

This would be pretty hard for Facebook to police would it not?

How could they determine guilty parties, perhaps sudden spikes in the amount of likes for a website or facebook page could be tell tale factors.

I really do not see this as being readily enforced.

the guidelines got changed recently and tightened the dependancy of contest participation to a Like. Strictly speaking you can do it via an App so long as its not the sole condition of entry. The risk of your facebook page getting “enforced” is high stakes for some brands. SEOMoz has a healthy thread about this. Personally I think the guidelines are not explicit enough as making an custom app is not a tall order. Inadvertent flouting and enforcements are likely to produce real anguish. Many admins will be experiencing an Eastwood moment: Feelin’ lucky?

Paul- the ‘Like’ being referred to is the ‘like’ that appears below status updates & on photos/ videos uploaded to Facebook. Not the actual ‘liking’ of a page.

I have seen a few pages(since these new guidelines have been introduced), continuing to ask their fans to ‘Like’ a photo which is in turn used as a ‘vote’ in a competition- some ask their fans to tag themselves or their friends in photos of videos… Both of these commonly used marketing/ promo techniques are now banned, as per the new guidelines.

I’ve seen a couple of pages have photos removed in the last week, thus resulting in an absolute nightmare for their promotion/ competition. This has led to lots of unhappy fans & negative posts being made on the page walls.

So, it’s very important that pages adopt to these new guidelines right away, or risk upsetting their following.

Facebook really do seem to have a strict zero tolerance policy regarding these new measures.

It’s shocking how many page admins are still not aware of these new guidelines & it’s left me wondering why on earth page admins weren’t sent a notification or email about the changes directly from Facebook. Shambles!

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/We-Support-A-Better-Fairer-Contest-Mechanism/212187148793709?sk=notes

Our crusade against Voting contest is clear :

1. too many fake accounts
2. to many fake exchanges.
3. you can buy votes online

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