Running competitions on Facebook is a great thing for businesses– it’s a brilliant way to embrace the power of Facebook and encourage your fans to engage with your brand.

A good competition is one of the best ways to boost engagement with your page, especially for businesses who are just starting out– they’re easy to set up and are almost guaranteed to generate interest (people love to get something for nothing!).

That’s the good news.

The bad news

What I’ve noticed cropping up recently is competitions worded along these lines:

‘Want to win these goodies? All you have to do is ‘like’ our page and ‘share’ this post!

Offering people the chance to win freebies is a powerful incentive to build those page likes and, by extension, an audience for your brand message.

Unfortunately, it also flies in the face of Facebook’s terms and conditions.

The rule

The practice of ‘like gating’, or requiring users to access content by liking a business page, was banned by Facebook in August last year.

Pages are also banned from using Facebook mechanisms– i.e. likes and shares– in their competitions.

Put plainly, you can’t run any competition that asks users to endorse your page personally– whether by liking a page, sharing a post to their timeline, or tagging their friends– on your business’ page.

According to Facebook, like gating and similar practices were banned in order to prohibit pages from building fans who are there purely for the reward– in other words, to encourage meaningful connections based on interest, rather than a desire for freebies.

If you’re cynical, you might also say that because the ‘like and share’ competition model is incredibly effective at boosting page likes, it interferes with Facebook’s own advertising options: if you run competitions to boost page likes yourself, you won’t be making use of their ‘page like’ advertising options.

Whatever the reason, and no matter how effective ‘like and share’ promotions may be, using them will land you with a hefty penalty from Facebook.

In a best-case scenario, this will be removing the promotion. There can be plenty of more serious consequences, though, ranging from penalising your page’s overall reach to suspending your page entirely. Facebook takes rule-breaking seriously, and if you cross them, you could end up losing access to all the valuable fans you’re connected with there.

Despite these risks, however, dodgy competition practices are still lingering.

Perhaps the temptation of an easy boost to page likes is too much to resist for some businesses. Perhaps it’s lack of knowledge of Facebook’s conditions. Perhaps businesses aren’t sure what their alternatives are when wording their competitions.

No matter what the reason, running ‘like and share’ contests on your page is a definite no-no.

So how else can I run competitions?

Competitions are still a brilliant way of encouraging engagement. Just be mindful that you can’t ask your fans for likes or shares– but you can get creative with the engagement you encourage.

Channel signups to your newsletter, ask for testimonials or customer feedback, or run a ‘caption this’ contest– all of these are brilliant ways of getting your fans active on your page and encouraging quality interaction from people who are really interested in your brand– not just farming empty likes.

So if you’re guilty of breaking the ‘like and share’ rule, change your ways! There are plenty of other effective models for your contests, and ones which will encourage engagement from real fans, not just prize-seekers.

Go forth and create effective contests that Facebook will approve of!

By Moya Vaughan Evans

Moya is a digital marketing expert, blogging specialist and Social Media Manager at Shake Social. Struggling to maintain your own blog? We can help!