NZ Facebook stats: December 2011

NZ Facebook stats

If there’s one thing that’s marked about New Zealand’s online activity, is the sheer dominance of Facebook over other platforms.

Facebook’s estimated New Zealand reach today was “2,100,220 people who live in New Zealand”, according to Facebook. The data also reveals over 54% of users returned daily – that’s at least 1,134,118 daily users of Facebook.

That’s a lot of people.

And they’re not just logging on – they’re participating. The data shows there are 15 million Kiwi wall posts made per month, 85 million comments a month left around the site, and 192,000 check-ins a month.

Here’s the data, courtesy of Facebook:

New Zealand Facebook data

Most Shared Articles on Facebook in 2011

Facebook have release a list of the top 40 articles shared on their platform this year. Thes stories range from strange to heartbreaking, and in terms of content providers, CNN and the NYT come out looking quite good.

So here’s the list:

  1. Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami (New York Times)
  2. What teachers really want to tell parents (CNN)
  3. No, your zodiac sign hasn’t changed (CNN)
  4. Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps (CNN)
  5. (video) – Father Daughter Dance Medley (Yahoo)
  6. At funeral, dog mourns the death of Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan (Yahoo)
  7. You’ll freak when you see the new Facebook (CNN)
  8. Dog in Japan stays by the side of ailing friend in the rubble (Yahoo)
  9. Giant crocodile captured alive in Philippines (Yahoo)
  10. New Zodiac Sign Dates: Ophiuchus The 13th Sign? (The Huffington Post)
  11. Parents keep child’s gender under wraps (Yahoo)
  12. How to Talk to Little Girls (The Huffington Post)
  13. Stop Coddling the Super-Rich (New York Times)
  14. Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior (Wall Street Journal)
  15. (video) – Twin Baby Boys Have A Conversation! (Yahoo)
  16. Man robs bank to get medical care in jail (Yahoo)
  17. Why You’re Not Married (The Huffington Post)
  18. A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs (New York Times)
  19. Ryan Dunn Dead: ‘Jackass’ Star Dies In Car Crash (The Huffington Post)
  20. Scientists warn California could be struck by winter ‘superstorm’ (Yahoo)
  21. Notes From a Dragon Mom (New York Times)
  22. A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not “Crazy” (The Huffington Post)
  23. Obama’s and Bush’s effects on the deficit in one graph (Washington Post)
  24. Penn State, my final loss of faith (Washington Post)
  25. Golden-Voiced Homeless Man Captivates Internet (Yahoo)
  26. The most typical face on the planet (Yahoo)
  27. Widespread destruction from Japan earthquake, tsunamis (CNN)
  28. Permissive parents: Curb your brats (CNN)
  29. A father’s day wish: Dads, wake the hell up! (CNN)
  30. (video) – Laughing Baby Loves Ripping Paper! (Yahoo)
  31. Epic Cover Letter: How To Get Hired For Your Dream Job (PICTURE) (The Huffington Post)
  32. New Zodiac sign dates: Don’t switch horoscopes yet (Washington Post)
  33. Things Babies Born in 2011 Will Never Know (Yahoo)
  34. The Psychology of Revenge: Why We Should Stop Celebrating Osama Bin Laden’s Death (The Huffington Post)
  35. (photo gallery) – ‘Where Children Sleep’ (New York Times)
  36. Quake moved Japan coast 8 feet, shifted Earth’s axis (CNN)
  37. Steve Jobs, Apple founder, dies (CNN)
  38. China’s latest craze: dyeing pets to look like other wild animals (CNN)
  39. Grant Hill’s Response to Jalen Rose (New York Times)
  40. Steve Jobs’s Patents (New York Times)

Most of this I’ve already read, if not shared with friends!

Facebook insights for web

Facebook page owners are starting to learn the real value of Facebook page insights – and it’s become even more important to know and understand your users now that Facebook’s new metrics are public.

But there’s a little-known analytics package in Facebook called Insights For Your Website, which can tell you a lot about who is hitting your site, what they’re sharing to Facebook, and how they’re sharing it.

From the insights you can deduce who your major advocates are, the demographics of users who are reaching your site, if your like buttons are working, and what Facebook social plugins are having the best impact.

So how do you access these insights?

First, you need a website and a Facebook account. Then you’ll need to prove to Facebook you have the rights to see the insights. Visit facebook.com/insights. In the top right hand corner there’s a button – hit it!

A popup will appear – and you’ll see a domain to put your website details in, and a dropdown menu. Select the brand page you want to hook the domain up to. Anyone who is admin on that brand page will be able to access the web analytics for the website. If it’s for personal use – for your blog or similar – then just select your own name.

There’s a line of code sitting in there. This is called a meta tag and it needs to go into the header of the main page of your website. Each website is different, so I can’t tell you exactly how to do this part. If you’re not sure how: Google is good.

Once you’ve inserted the line, come back to this screen and click “Get Insights” – it’s that simple!

Now you’re in, and given Facebook a couple of minutes to get all the data loaded, it’s time to pick the meaty bits. For me, it’s looking at demographic information, and the conversion between like button impressions and like button shares.

Breaking your users down into age and gender is useful if you’re dealing with demo targeting – something helpful if you’re advertising, but perhaps not so much for the layperson. It’s still interesting stuff, though.

I also like to compare impression demos against those on the Facebook page they relate to. Is there an area of my web audience who aren’t liking my posts? Is there a section who aren’t clicking the like buttons? Who are doing organic shares – and do those rates tell me that my like buttons are under-utilised, and may be in the wrong place on the page?

Another useful insight is the Popular Pages section – you can see how many times the like button has been clicked or URL organically shared to Facebook on certain pages and start to see patterns in what gets your audience sharing.

So give it a go – hook your website into Facebook insights. I’d love to hear about your results!

The 4 stages of a business Facebook page

Although no two Facebook pages are the same, there are some similarities that appear across multiple pages.

There are four main stages your page goes though, and once you identify the stage your page is in, you can use some standard tips and tricks to get it to the next level.

Sometimes pages will naturally progress from stage to stage, sometimes they’ll go backwards, and sometimes they won’t fit any stage at all! Don’t worry– just keep your eyes on where you want your page to be, and work towards that.

Stage 1: Getting your page off the ground.

When Facebook pages are new, the community is still finding the boundaries and tone of the page. It is at this stage you can easily convert brand advocates though quick wins, answering questions and being the good guy.

By turning your early fans into brand advocates, they will help you monitor and set the tone for your page when it enters stage 2. These fans are likely to be your friends, family and workmates, so be explicit about asking them to be active on your page. Honest – but active.

Tips for a page in stage 1

  • Think like the person you want to attract. What would they like to see on your page?
  • Post regular, interesting and infomative content – posting no more than four times a week and no less than once a week.
  • Keep your tone friendly. Facebook recommend you “push” in only 20% of status updates. The other 80% should be relationship-building.
  • Set your spam filter, and any keywords. Pick wisely as to not stifle the natural conversation, but to not allow any content that may disturb your audience.
  • Fully complete the “info” section of the Facebook page.
  • Set flexible strategies around dealing with negative feedback now. Where are your brand’s boundaries around negative posts? Should you allow them on your Facebook page? (I say yes, by the way, that’s a natural part of being in a public forum. Don’t delete it unless the language is filthy or threatening.)
  • Create a landing page that explicitly asks people to like your page.
  • Upload lots of photos and any videos you have to make the page interesting and useful.
  • Read Facebook’s brand page terms and conditions.
  • Get a username (facebook.com/username) once you have 25 fans. Make it short and to the point. This URL will help you in stage 2.

Stage 2: Building momentum with existing fans

Reach out to your existing fans by promoting your Facebook page to them using the custom URL. This may involve putting a social plug-in on your website, a mention in your e-letter, or a notice on your front counter or shop window. They already like what you have to offer, why not make it easy for them to find you on Facebook?

Tips for a page in stage 2

  • Keep an eye on your page’s insights to see who your fans are: Their locations, demographics, what they most respond to on your page, what they’re clicking on. If they don’t match your wider marketing plan, something’s a little off.
  • Be seen to be responding to feedback, good and bad alike. Seek feedback from your fans and act upon it. If they say they’d like to see x happen, and it’s reasonable, make x happen. If it’s not, be honest about that.
  • Keep an eye on what’s going into your spam filter and restore anything that’s been mistakenly tagged as spam.
  • Find pages similar to yours and see what works on their page. Try similar things on yours to see if they work with your audience.
  • Plug your website into Facebook insights to see the demographic that’s impressing against your social plug-ins. Who are you not converting to a Facebook fan?
  • Keep an eye on which posts get the most impressions – what time of day were they posted?

Stage 3: Time for a push

This is the stage where your page is doing ok, but could do with a boost. Consider some advertising. Facebook ads can cost as little as 60cents CPM. You may want to add your custom URL to any external advertising you have running as well.

This means you’ll be getting a lot of random likers – which can often mean trolling. Don’t be afraid to ban troublemakers – but be sure that’s what they are first! Often we can mistake grumpy customers as trolls and not treat them the way they deserve.

If you’ve done stages 1 and 2 well, your loyal fans will help weed out trolling, and be able to answer basic questions for users – Dell found this a useful tactic when coming out of their Dell Hell phase.

Tips for a page in stage 3

  • Lots of new people will be hitting your landing page – adjust it slightly so anyone can understand why they should like your page. “Like our page to hear about special offers” etc.
  • Create custom tabs – for example a FAQ section or latest news section might be a good start.
  • Logged in as your brand, like and write on the walls of any brands that compliment or partner with yours. Check with their page admins first if you can, and don’t be cheeky about it or they may ban your page.
  • Empower, support, and reward users who want to be brand advocates, and acknowledge them for their help.
  • Make sure your community mangers are equipped to deal with negative feedback – both professionally and personally.
  • Don’t run promotions where users leave a comment or upload a photo to enter. That’s against Facebook’s terms and conditions and you may come out with egg on your face.

Stage 4: Organic growth

At this stage your page should be pretty healthy and you should have strategies in place for processing trolling, negative feedback, suggestions, and answering questions you don’t always have answers for. There’s an interesting phenomenon that I noticed – and have had confirmed to me by other major account managers across multiple brand types and sizes – that you no longer need to run ads during this stage, and the page will grow exponentially.

Don’t be alarmed when the growth starts to level out. The size of your page when this happens depends on your reach, and the profile of your business. Your organic growth may slow to 1 – 2 % per week.

Tips for a page in stage 4

  • Don’t rest on your laurels. Set big engagement and impression goals. Continue to evolve your page, being lead by your fans and wider business objectives.
  • Keep an eye on hide rates and unlikes and moderate your postings
  • Crowd source. There’s likely to be some users with amazing ideas for your business, or some feedback trends going on.
  • Consider another ad spend.

 

This is by no means a fully comprehensive list of things to check off with a Facebook page, and may not be applicable to all brands. In fact, this is quite general, and somewhat oversimplified compared to reality and the curveballs that get thrown at you.

The main thing you need to keep in mind is to think like a page user. What do they want? Deliver that and you can’t go wrong.

How to write a brand Facebook post

Writing a great Facebook status update for a brand is so much more than a simple formula. If it were that easy, we’d have a whole bunch of amazing pages and a lot of happy brand managers. You can’t just pick up a marketing plan and implement it, word-for-word, into a Facebook page.

I think there are three layers to creating a brand’s Facebook update.

The Users

Your tone, subject matter, even the kinds of words you use should be dictated by the users of the page, who are attracted to your existing brand. If your brand is marketed correctly outside of Facebook, those who ‘like’ will reflect that.

Who are these people? Use Facebook Insights to learn basic demographics – age, sex, location. Check their profiles to see what else they ‘like’ on Facebook. Do they like polls? Photos? Links? What do they want from your branded page? Read what’s been posted to the brand’s wall already – there’s often a wealth of feedback in what’s there – or not there. Which leads onto point two:

The Page

What is the current state of your brand’s page? Neglected? No engagement? Is every status update a link, and no one’s clicking on them? Conversely, is your page vibrant with feedback and users chatting to one another? You can expect to adjust your next status according to the current state of the page. This may mean scrapping a status you hoped to pop up, and going with something completely different. Content calendars must be fluid, even for this reason alone.

The Brand

What does the brand actually want out of their Facebook page – and if it doesn’t serve your ‘fans’ then why are you doing it? Does it serve the marketing gods? The website hit gods? Or is it there to enrich peoples lives – however you interpret that.

If your brand is not thinking “people first” then you probably need to re-assess why you’re on Facebook. You may as well take out a TVC. (No disrespect to TVCs, you know I love them, but they’re broadcast. Facebook is not.)

So once the brand knows where it stands on those fronts – and has any issues addressed, it’s time to get writing! Here’s a few nuggets of gold from around the weberverse:

  • Spelling and grammar must be audience appropriate. No matter how great your point if you can’t spell ‘their’ right you’ll crash and burn. – Stephanie Robertson
  • Know your audience – and don’t drink and post! – Wendy Thompson
  • Ask for photos. – Claire Huxley

And here are mine:

  • Keep posts short. People read less online. They probably won’t click “read more” on your update.
  • Keep it friendly – users are looking at brand’s status updates amongst their friends, so it’s easy to appear advertorial.
  • Give people multiple reasons to interact (make it ‘like’able, ask a question, seek feedback).
  • Don’t always do the same type of status. Mix it up with photos, polls, and links. Pay attention to which types get your audience going!
  • Act on feedback. For example, if someone’s asked for a “caption this” photo, give it to them! And say something like “you asked for it, so here it is!” – acknowledgement is really important.
  • Above all else, THINK LIKE A FAN. Do they want to see this status update? Really?

So it’s not a simple formula, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. But by firstly coming at it from a user’s perspective, you’ll end the majority of Facebook status woes.

Facebook marketing: A best practice guide

Facebook have released a best practice guide to Facebook marketing. It’s in-depth and useful, but also involved, so I thought I’d summerise for you.

Here’s the key points.

Facebook say there are five guiding principles to great social marketing:

  1. Build a strategy that is first and foremost social, and integrated into broader marketing and business objectives
  2. Create an authentic brand voice by being straightforward and consistent.
  3. Make it interactive – always engage in two-way conversations and create content that people will be excited to pass along.
  4. Nurture relationships. Stay in touch, reward loyalty and keep content easy to consume. Think long-term.
  5. Get feedback in real time and use reporting tools to learn about your fans.

They then expand upon these areas – I’ve left my thoughts under their points.

Foster product development and innovation

“Facebook allows you to learn about your audience… For this reason, Facebook can be used to generate new product ideas and innovation.”

Know your audience, and allow the conversaion to be led by them – albeit in keeping with your guidelines. I’ve found doing this gives your fans page ownership and the freedom to make some interesting and insightful suggestions!

Generate Awareness

“Once you have created a Facebook page, it is time to generate awareness.”

In a nutshell, Facebook want you to buy their ads. They are cheap, effective, and can be highly targeted. It’s a shame they don’t let you book in $NZD or access non-standard ad types without an agency, but it’s still a cost-effective way to build your brand.

Don’t forget to put links to your Facebook page throughout your website – turn your visitors into subscribers with a click of a button.

Drive preference and differentiation

“On Facebook, people discover your brand through trusted referrals from their friends.”

This is one of the big positives social media has over traditional – personal endorsement much more public, and users are much more likely to engage with brands their friends have recommended. Keep sharability in mind when writing status updates.

Facebook have got a lot of social plug-ins you can use to socialise your website and brand. Use them where appropriate.

Increase traffic and sales

“A combination of word of mouth and your ability to deepen engagement with your customers at the point of purchase is incredibly powerful at driving traffic and sales.”

Facebook recommend putting like buttons on products, and integrating post-purchase sharing to consumer’s walls. The same could be said for like buttons on articles if you’re a blogger. Facebook also recommends buying Facebook ads to push directly to the point of sale.

Build loyalty and deepen relationships

“Because of the information people share about themselves on Facebook, you can create highly custom and personalized experiences to drive engagement and loyalty.”

Ask questions, listen to the answers, and be responsive. Thank people. Provide exclusive information for Facebook fans. If you’re a multi-national, target updates to users in various countries. I hope that feature will soon extend to cities, but in the meanwhile, try to not alienate users by overwhelming them with information that they can’t act upon.

Amplify recommendation and word of mouth

“Everything you do on Facebook is viral. People expect to discover things on Facebook through their friends.”

Encourage people to like your page – and your status updates. Put the like button on your website. Have fresh, sharable content on your Facebook page. Make everything clickable, shareable, hyperlinked and tidy (check how your links appear in Facebook when put into the URL feature… Is it clean or does it need editing?)

Gain Insights

“Insights can help improve your business by helping you stay aligned with the people you serve.”

Insights: Where would you be without them? Probably shouting into a dark room. Use Facebook ad campaign reports. Use Facebook insights – both on your page and for web. Read your Facebook wall… And when I say “read” I mean “read between the lines.” Sometimes what people don’t say says more than what they do.

Finally, use these tools:

Guide to Facebook ads: facebook.com/adsmarketing
Guide to running competitions on Facebook: facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php
Social plugins for your site: developers.facebook.com/plugins
Facebook insights: facebook.com/insights

Facebook Strategy 101

There’s a lot of talk online about the strategy behind brands using social media outlets, but not a lot of leadership.

In fact, many of the companies who are charging the earth for social strategy don’t seem to have that great of a strategy themselves – you know, the smoke and mirrors types.

If you don’t have the basics right, throwing money at marketing and promotion is not going to help you a hell of a lot.

A social media strategy must be bespoke to the brand. It has to take into account the time and money available, the rules of the platforms, best practice, and local culture. It must also fit into an over-arching marketing strategy that’s not just about social.

Brands hoping to pick up an overseas stategy and impliment it into a new culture may find themselves in trouble, just as a brand who flaunts a “she’ll be right” attitude would.

So lets focus on Facebook. As a person who oversees around 130 Facebook pages with members ranging in size from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands, there’s some basic points I’ve found will help you get it right.

Know your brand, and know what you want from the platform. Are you on Facebook to build brand awareness? Gain insights into your fans? Crowd source? Get hits to your website? Make sales? Without these very basic questions answered – and weighted – you’ll be directionless.

Focus on user engagement, not “like” numbers. Facebook provide brilliant insights. Use them to see your engagement levels, reach, and who your audience actually is. The better your engagment, the “stickier” your updates will be – meaning more people will see them. It’s pretty easy to look at a page with 10,000 fans and be envious, but is anyone actually reading and interacting with status updates? If you’re not getting any likes, wall posts, click throughs or feedback, you’re in trouble.

Keep your hide rate low, and find out why users are hiding your feed. This comes back to using Facebook insights well. If you lost a large number of subscribers one day, follow that day back on your feed. Did you update too often? Were you abrasive or overly advertorial? Once a subscriber hides your feed, it’s hard to win them back. Stay on top of your hide – and unlike – rates.

Keep tabs on what works for your subscribers. Do they ‘like’ pictures or links? Do images of faces work better than logos? At what time of day is posting most effective? Find out what works with your audience, and deliver. Track click throughs and adjust your updates according to which times, words, and link types work best with your audience.

Landing pages explicitly encouraging viewers to “like” your page. It works and it’s worth the time investment to make it happen. Add an extra like button at the bottom, especially if your landing page is long. Keep an eye on which pages are being hit. If you’re getting thousands to your landing page and few on your wall, fix your landing page.

You have a spam filter. Use it wisely. Same goes for tagging users from your status update, and writing on walls as your brand. Tread very, very carefully. Train your audience in acceptable ways to interact with your brand. Set the profanity filter if necessary.

Tips for status updates:

  • Keep them brief, and don’t update too often!
  • Listen to what your audience is talking about, and use their subjects, phrases and trends as appropriate.
  • Users are seeing the update amongst their friend’s updates, so it is easy to appear advertorial. Keep this in mind when posting a status or link.
  • Think community building first, promotion second.
  • Give subscribers a reason to interact with your update. The more they interact, the better you rank in their algorhythm, and the higher you’ll appear in their sticky feed.

Naturally there are a truckload of things you learn with experience. But you can fast-track your knowledge by correctly using Facebook insights and by paying attention to what works for your audience. Don’t be afraid to experiment, and once you’re familiar with what works, and have a happy wee community, invest some serious money in a campaign or Facebook ads.

Also – and I can’t say this enough – read Facebook’s Terms and Conditions, especially around running competitions, and what is and isn’t acceptable conduct on the Facebook platform.

Even with these few tips and tricks, I think you’ll be able to make some impact with your brands on Facebook. I’d love to hear your insights, please share what’s worked – or not worked – for you.


Facebook Insights Explained

I have always said using Facebook successfully is not about the size of your community – anyone can pay for Facebook ads and rent a crowd – but it is first and foremost about engaging your community and providing a platform for conversations.

Facebook insights are a really valuable tool, and if you’re ignoring them, you may as well be ignoring your community.

To access insights, you must have a branded page on Facebook – not a profile. You shouldn’t use your brand as a profile for several reasons: It limits you to 5,000 connections, people think it’s naff, it is against Facebook’s terms and conditions, and most importantly, you can’t access the insights unless you have a branded page.

Facebook insights can be broken down into three areas: Those attached to a post, those attached to a page, and those attached to a website.

Post Insights

Insights attached to a post are useful for seeing what kind of post gets the most interaction

You can use this information to gauge which posts work with your audience – although it won’t tell you if they were interacting positively or negatively. Still, it’s useful for noticing trends.

Impressions are how many times your update has been viewed – much like a PI for web. Feedback is a like or comment as a percentage of impressions.

The higher the engagement, the higher you’ll feature on users home feed – both because of the user’s algorithm for interaction, and because you’ve got a highly engaged post. This may also impact a Facebook-based social search in the future, so getting it right now will save you playing catch-up later.

You can also see the 10 most popular updates in your page insights.

Page Insights

You can find page insights from either the insights dashboard on your page (click “edit page” and then “insights”) or from Facebook.com/insights.

There is a lot of information on page insights, and it’s broken down into three parts: A general overview, user demographics, and interaction insights.

General overview: The key here is that you want the graphs trending up. If they are continually tracking down, or never had a heartbeat in the first place, fix whatever is broken.
User demo: Know your users. Who ‘likes’ you? How did they find your page? Why did they ‘unlike’ your page? Adjust your updates accordingly.
Interaction insights: This is where you can see (amongst other things) users hiding your feed – a key place to start for working out if you’re posting too much, too often, or posting information your community doesn’t want to see.

Website Insights

If you haven’t done it already, hook your website up to Facebook via Facebook.com/insights.

Click “Insights for your website”, select the brand page you’re linking the site to, and you get meta tag code to pop into your root webpage to confirm you have the rights. Once you’ve inserted the meta tag, head back to insights to confirm ownership.

This opens up a world of information. From this dashboard you can see who is sharing links to your site – either by clicking like buttons, using social plug-ins, or organically.

You can also find out how many clicks back to your site you’ve gotten. This can be helpful for seeing if the link displayed upon a share is doing you any favours. A low score here can mean you may need to work on how the link feeds through.

You can also pull demographics for impressions against like buttons – something previously difficult for small business to track. This can give you a good picture of who is using your site. Having said that, it’s a skewed snapshot – it only captures logged in Facebook users, and that may not be a large proportion of your website users.

There are so many insights available using this function, and with such an expansive flow-on for how you implement Facebook social plug-ins on your website that I can’t go into it all. But I recommend spending some quality time going through the web insights and seeing how your site is stacking up.

Questions have been raised about how Facebook’s insights work with Google analytics. I haven’t tracked anything back yet but it makes sense that any page containing GA that is iframed into a Facebook tab would be trackable. Having said that, putting a ?ref=fbcode (where fbcode is a bespoke code you’ve created for this) on any links in the iframed page would be trackable on GA so long as the destination URL has the analytics loaded. Has anyone had a play with this yet and can give a definitive answer? May have to take it to Quora.

Phew! That’s a lot of information right there, but hopefully you find it useful. Please leave a comment with your insight tips and tricks – I’m sure we’d all love to hear them.

Facebook Competitions: Don’t Run One Till You’ve Read This!

Facebook-based competitions are a big problem. I touched on this in an earlier blog, but I got a lot of messages from shocked FB users asking for more information… So here it is.

You can only run a competition – which Facebook often calls a promotion – via a third-party app in a competitions tab on the page. It’s all laid out in theirPromotional Guidelines, but in a nutshell there are no wall-based “‘like’ to enter” or “comment to enter” competitions acceptable to Facebook. You can’t have a “like our page to enter” competition, either.

You can run a competition on a tab that’s only visible when someone’s liked a page, which is the best way to run a competition that users can opt into entering. The easiest way to do this is using a FBML tab, and hosting the entry mechanism on your own site.

Here’s a copy of an email warning sent by Facebook to a friend about a ‘comment to win’ competition run recently:

Hi,

Our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and the related Promotions Guidelines govern how a promotion may be run on Facebook. You are receiving this warning because we have determined that you are violating our guidelines.

Please correct and/or remove any violations within the 24-hour period after this email was sent to you, or we may disable or unpublish your Page. We recommend that you review the following guidelines and remove the promotions violations as soon as possible.

Promotions Guidelines: http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php
Statement of Rights & Responsibilities: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php(Section 3.9)

After removing the violating content, if you’re interested in working with an Account Representative to develop a new promotion, please visit:http://www.facebook.com/business/contact.php

Thanks,

Macarena
User Operations
Facebook

 

They’re watching, and if you don’t comply, they reserve the right to remove your promotion, or even your page.

Is it worth the risk?