In August last year Facebook relaxed their promotions guidelines.
All those businesses that had been flying under the radar, collecting “likes” and “comments” on posts as a means of entry into a competition suddenly became compliant.
All those businesses who had been following the rules and administering their promotions through third party apps rejoiced as it became much quicker and simpler to run a competition.
As a marketer I remain sceptical about the benefits of running a facebook promotion directly from a page post, are you giving away too much for a “like”, isn’t your product or service worth more than that?
A Facebook promotion run directly from your page or post, will have short term benefits, it’s pretty much guaranteed to encourage engagement, which may see an increase in your PTAT (People Talking About This) metric, but once the chatter dies down what exactly are you left with?
I still advocate running Facebook promotions from third part apps and here’s why…
- You can like-gate the entry to grow your page fan numbers
- You can brand your promotion, and it looks professional
- It’s easy to share the promotion through other online and offline marketing channels
- Your competition rules can be posted within the app (remember you’re still required to release Facebook from any contest responsibility)
- Most importantly of all, you can collect an email address upon submission, so you can market to your entrants at a later date
Case Study
Over the past month I’ve run four competitions for clients through applications, all have proven extremely successful.
One client’s promotion increased their page “likes” by 350%, and in the same promotion, 84% of all entrants subscribed to the client’s newsletter, allowing them to market to these new prospective customers in the future.
Now that’s not selling yourself short, that’s a return on investment!
