Five reasons Twitter users want to quit

Social networking platform Twitter has many uses – staying in touch with friends, catching breaking news live from the scene, networking with potential business contacts, finding feedback, help and general rubbernecking.

But lately many high-profile users are abandoning the interface, and the reasons are just as varied.

When I put a call out on Twitter about twittexhausion, I thought I had a fair idea how this blog would turn out. Well, I was wrong.

I was inundated with messages. It seems there’s a fair amount of long-term, high-level users who are about to put Twitter onto semi-permanent hiatus. Why?

Shortland Street called, it wants its storyline back

“Did you hear @someone just lost their job?” “OMG did you SEE her tweet?” “I heard that @suchandsuch has hooked up with @thatguy!” “My life sucksssssssssssssssssssssss.”

It’s exhausting, and yet we get sucked into dramas and whines that aren’t even ours.

“So many gloaters, whiners and gossipers,” one user said. “When did it get like this?”

“I’ve almost stopped tweeting as was getting so worked up reading other people’s comments. My stream full of whining! Time off = good for me,” another user tweeted.

“The ridiculous immaturity of some users at times. The gossip. The scandal. The negativity. The drama,” one user said.

“I was worrying and getting angry about things that just weren’t important or getting sucked into dramas without even contributing to them, or knowing the people involved – dedicating head space to the dramas of strangers is just stupid,” another person messaged.

This leads nicely into point two:

Twitter fights, bullying, and inappropriate messaging

Several high-profile tweeters were targeted recently by a bully who posted inappropriate content about them, and a group of young women were targeted by a local tweeter who wanted to see nude photos, then chastised them for not sharing.

“It’s hard. It makes me feel gross. I’ve blocked him now but I feel uneasy when I see other people talking to him,” one user said. “I want to tell them all what he said to me but I don’t want to bring it all up again. I’d rather leave it alone.”

“Enough with the faceless, nameless people who hurl abuse!” another high-profile tweeter said.

I am not my workplace

For those who use Twitter openly for both work and personal use, the pressure to stay “on brand” and above-board can be overwhelming.

As one community manager puts it, “people keep asking me work questions on my own account. I was hoping for some time out but there’s no down time when people know where you work.”

“People’s expectations don’t match reality and that’s taken the fun out of Twitter for me,” another user writes. “People expect me to be on call for them 24/7, and then they abuse me when I’m not. I’m feeling frustrated, sad, overwhelmed and over it.”

Twitter is not the Olympics.

Why are so many Twitter users focused on measuring tools like Klout, follower numbers, RTs and the like? It’s exhausting.

“The need to be the most RTed, or replied to or doing that thing where you don’t RT properly and you mangle my carefully crafted tweet by shortening words,” one tweeter said. “Or worse: Make it into a tweet that uses deck.ly or twitlonger, just so you can get your name in front of it. That still pisses me off.”

You don’t have to be first with breaking news. You don’t have to have 100 Klout. You don’t need 10,000 followers. You aren’t playing for a trophy. It’s not a competition.

The fakes and the wannabes

“The charlatans, the fakes, the really fucking bad writers who publish blogs about writing and engaging with people but with spelling mistakes. It is as damaging to your brain as watching the E! channel without any of the shows, just the loud, shouty, vacuous promos,” one Twitter user said. “And even though you don’t have to, you’d find yourself clicking links and ingesting the rubbish.”

“Twitter is getting overwhelmed with social media gurus who are regurgitating the same stuff, then wanking each other off over it,” another said. “New Zealand is too small for that kind of crap. It puts me off them and using Twitter.”

“The bigger twitter gets, the more it reminds me of High School, and then [I] worry I’m not cool enough,” another user wrote.

Simone McCallum has blogged about her experience of nearly giving up Twitter – give it a read.

So what can we do about twittexhausion?

Here’s five steps I suggest you take to relieve some of the Twitter fatigue

  1. Have a break. Turn the Tweetdeck off, go for a walk or watch some telly – even if it’s just for a few minutes. Don’t tweet your rage.
  2. Re-assess Twitter’s place in your life. Recognise which of your buttons are being pushed, and why, then deal with that by talking it through with a friend, writing it down, or however you process.
  3. Make a private list, and fill it with people who make you smile. Use that as your main feed.
  4. Assert yourself. If you don’t like the way someone is tweeting at you, tell them – and if you have to, block them. Be polite about it, but don’t stand for behaviour which makes you uncomfortable.
  5. Go out for drinks with like-minded Twitter users and have a big bitch. Get it off your chest, then have a laugh about it. You’ll feel much better knowing that you aren’t alone.

Best Tweets: May 2011

Without any ado, here are your best Kiwi tweets of May 2011…

Stay classy

paulapenfold Misread new follower @bouncingpom as “bouncing porn”, which conjured up images in my mind that aren’t needed at lunchtime on a Tuesday.
TV2BOY Overheard on the 6th Floor. “I’m not asking you because you’re Asian. But do you know anything about Origami?”
jonohutchison Someone broke into gf’s car overnight; stole a bottle of sparkling grape juice. Keeping an eye out for disappointed-looking alcoholics today
RyanSproull NZ has been ranked second most peaceful country in the world, after Iceland. Watch your back, Iceland. We’re coming for you.
beekay77 Just heard “junkie” as John Key. Sentence still made sense.
muffinmum If you are mid 50’s & were in Petone at lunch time with skin tight jeans, top tip: readjust your tackle in the loo rather than middle of cafe
monique_TV3 Oz Woman’s Weekly boasts royal Wedding coverage including “private touching moments”. Perhaps marketing team need to learn about commas.

I’m not the smarterest

philwalter I suggested that the current wife be a good mother and make me and the children breakfast. I may have overplayed that hand.
mrbrownsbag So declaring a fake sick day via twitter does NOT go down well with the boss. I’ve suggested I take the day off to think about what I’ve done.
cadetdory Tired. Just turned the light off and then spent several seconds trying to figure out why the room had gone dark.

The Rapture

MoataTamaira Hm. So boyfriend has been invited to The Rapture via Facebook but I have not.
rosiecd Is Rapture happening on a rollout? Or greenwich mean time? Just want to plan my weekend.

Universal truth

Vegrandis Unitard – the garment with the power to make you look like its name!
trisclayton I’d like to sniff Peter Dunne’s hair. I think it would smell of cinnamon and integrity.
pipkeane 6 adults. 3 kids and nobody can work DVD player

Yes, this is my life

ErinJackson Strange. Very angry ex fiancé™ just texted me to alert me that if I don’t use my qantas points within 18 months they expire.
rhysiedarby Busy writing to fans. They haven’t written to me, I’m just taking the first step in hopes of some replies
antsgardiner I just noticed that my block of cheese has teeth marks in it. I guess I got quite drunk last night.

Wellywood

WellywoodSign Why so serious Wellington? Its not like I’m killing kittens
annagconnell You know what would make the wellywood sign even better? Comic sans.

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

Learn from my biggest social media mistake

You may have noticed this lovely new site I have, thanks to Inkode SEO.

I wasn’t planning on building a new site to fill with my writing – surely my existing blog, Twitter and various Tumblrs were enough – but when my name got Googlejacked, action was needed.

Googlejacked? How did that happen?

Simple: I didn’t own my name on Google. I was ripe for the picking.

A few years ago – before I really knew what search engine optimization was – I created accounts on various social networks. I thought that by using a made-up handle and not my real name, I’d be saving myself privacy issues in the future.

Those accounts grew followers and links, and I was happy.

I would write articles for various websites under my real name, and was pleased to see them appear on Google when I searched for myself.

But when I upset a SEO/SM company I had never heard of – whose business model I had inadvertently disproved in a blog post – all that came to a quick end.

Suddenly when you googled me, some not very nice things came up. Using track backs, clever headers and link baiting, the angry company managed to get themselves to rank for my name – with slurs in the headers.

At this point I need to ask that if you search me to see what I’m talking about, please don’t click the links. Don’t link to the website in question. You’ll sate your appetite, but only reward and encourage their kind of nonsense.

Luckily, I have a large and intelligent group of people around me, so thanks to Aidan Rogers and Simon Young, I’ve been able to correct some of my SEO mistakes.

So what can you learn from my burn?

Own your name on search

  1. Use your real name on social media websites such as LinkedIn, YouTube, GoMiso, Google profiles, Quora and Twitter. These will normally rank quite well and can dominate your first page, pushing out any unwanted results.
  2. Get your name on a .co.nz or .com url – search engines will recognise you as the owner of your name and give weight to both inbound and outbound links. This is also helpful for giving google juice to your social network profiles.
  3. Link your sites using strong anchor text – your name in particular.
  4. Ask your friends to link to your .co.nz where appropriate to strengthen your ranking. Get them to use your name as anchor text.
  5. Own your own images. Upload them with filenames such as firstname-lastname.jpg and always use alt text to secure them to your search results.
  6. If you’re writing for another site, ask for a hyperlinked byline at the top of your article.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’ll help you get on your way.

So has my wee problem been solved? Not yet, but with a little work, we’ll get there.

Meanwhile, you can learn from the error of my ways: Secure your search ranking now and lock out any hijackers before they can do any damage.

[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]http://cateowen.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/cate-owen-twitter.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Cate Owen writes stuff. You just read some. Choice.

Follow Cate on Twitter.

 [/author_info] [/author]

Best Tweets: April 2011

The best Kiwi Tweets of April 2011

Life is good

RachSmalley Mum’s arrived up from ChCh with a hacksaw in her luggage. She said “I just thought some of your trees could do with a trim.”
CathyKoo I know it’s how they became mums in the first place but the Happy Mother’s Day signs in sex shop windows are creeping me out.
Stitchpunk Dear Weight Watchers, please take Your email guide to Easter and fuck right off. Kthxbai
JaneLuscombe At a Hawaii party. Among the myriad of loud shirts and leis is a sole soul dressed as a ham and pineapple pizza
sophlyon Man on train underlining passages from The Da Vinci Code quite ferociously. Slightly unnerving. Red pen too.
bobsyauncle Bear Grylls just vomited up his raw goats testicle. He’s getting soft
Vegrandis Bitch it’s 12 items or LESS. It doesn’t mean you can do two transactions, it defeats the purpose. I will slap you.

We are New Zealand

stevebiddle There are obviously plenty of people from out of town in Wgtn today. I’ve never seen so many foolish attempts to use an umbrella.
nicki_nz 45 km north of Hamilton and there are cars stopped beside the road and people with cameras. No idea why but we’ve joined them.
Motmunter “Sorry for the delay but we’re rushed off our feet, we’ve had 3 people in this morning” – Wanaka car rental lady.
hdpaONENEWS I’m pretty sure the PM just made up a word: mentoror. Sounds like a dinosaur.
RichieHMcCaw Most people get what’s coming to them. Unless it’s sent via NZ Post.

Oops

annagconnell Note to self – do not present the draft proposal that has ‘arghhhhhhhhhh fucky mcfuck sticks’ written into it. Your boss looks at you funny.
WendyWings GizmoNZ just had a YEAH I AM A DOG moment and ran head first into the wall, I am glad I am not a dog.
annelisevickery So, I want to do a cock pot meal tomorrow, takes 4 hrs in high, can I prep it all now and get the man to stick it on later?

This is Twitter!

TheNoemi When following someone new, it’s imperative for me to know where they’re from so I read their tweets in the correct accent on my head.
benjamintelfer Recently, I’ve had more cats request to see my tweets than people …

If you want to nominate a tweet for May, simply send the message URL to @CateOwen

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.

Five Reasons You Shouldn’t Care About Twitter Follower Numbers

Why do we judge the quality of a tweeter by the amount of people they have following them? And why do we pay so much attention to our follower numbers? It is such crap, and here’s five reasons why.

1. Follower numbers are easily inflated.
Here’s how easy:

The follow/followback principle (you follow me, so I’ll follow you) is nice in theory – after all, it’s polite to follow someone who follows you – but it’s also a really easy way to quickly boost your follower numbers. You’ll recognise these people as the ones who follow you, then unfollow if you don’t reciprocate. They’ll probably follow you again tomorrow.

You can hit certain keywords, hashtags or magic bio words which cause bots to follow you. They’re fake followers, and there’s a lot of them.

You can create an army of accounts, and have them follow you. People do this for business reasons, or potential SEO reasons. It’s not as uncommon as you’d think.

Buying followers is also reasonably common. $100 and a credit card can see you gain 10,000 followers in a matter of minutes.

2. Follower numbers are not engagement numbers.
Are your followers actually hitting your website, buying your products, or using your services (if that’s your goal)? Are you getting retweeted or replies? That’s what counts on social. Measuring tools like Klout might be considered helpful, but really aren’t the be all and end all. Don’t look at a tweeter’s 50,000 followers and think that automatically translates to website UBs and sales – or even intelligent tweets.

One important factor: Lists. Just because someone has a lot of followers, does not mean those followers are ‘subscribed’. You may be on private lists which means you’re being ‘subscribed to’ without actually being followed – and vice versa! Follower numbers do not equal eyeballs to your messages.

Another factor is “speciality” – I don’t know a thing about cars, so if I advised my followers to buy a Mazda, they’d probably laugh at me. Jeremy Clarkson advises you to buy a Mazda, you nod in awe and buy a fricken Mazda. Even if I had more followers than Jeremy Clarkson, which do you think matters to Mazda? It’s not about follower numbers.

3. Investment in
This one is simple: The more time you spend on Twitter, and the longer you’ve been on, the more followers you’re bound to have. Some people can’t spend all day on Twitter, so naturally they’ll have fewer followers – unless they’re Carolyn3News – when is that woman going to tweet?

Sometimes it’s about quality, not quantity!

4. Maybe you’re not mainstream flavour
You’re a round peg and Twitter is a square hole. Who really cares? If you tweet heaps and that loses you followers, it’s not the end of the world. Just have fun and be yourself. You’ll never please everyone, and if you lose followers for it, then so be it.

Unless you’re publishing your foursquare updates to your feed. No one wants to see that shit.

5. Emotional well-being
Obsession with follower numbers is nothing but damaging. Your drive for followers is probably coming from some other unmet need. Want to be famous? Respected? Well-liked? Listened to? Answer that need and you’ll find your obsession with who.unfollowed.me or friendorfollow will die off.

It is not a personal slight if someone you’ve never met thinks your 140 characters shouldn’t appear on a timeline of a social media tool they look at twice a week.

If you only have 100 followers and think that’s somehow a poor reflection on how lovely you are, think again. It’s not. There are some dipshits with thousands of followers out there.

There is nothing wrong with wanting a lot of followers. It’s human nature to want to be popular and liked. Just keep it in context.

And don’t get me started on Facebook friends.

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?