Facebook makes it legal for pages to run contests for comments and likes

Facebook is helping businesses on the social networking website make it easier to reach out to its fans by making slight adjustments to its Page Terms. Third-party services will no longer be required for pages to be able to run contests and promotions from Facebook.

In a blog post announcing the changes to Facebook’s Page Terms, the team wrote that it had removed the requirement that promotions on Facebook only have to be administered through applications. Businesses will now be able to collect entries by allowing users to post on the page. They can even like and comment on a page after entering the contest. Entries through messages to the page are now also permitted.

Liking and commenting to win prizes perfectly legal now

Most interestingly, Facebook pages will now be allowed to consider “likes” as a sort of voting mechanism that can be used to win contests. Of course, just like before, business pages will not be allowed to leech on to personal Timelines in order to promote themselves or run contests.

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This might come as a surprise to most Facebook users who’ve been participating in or seeing contests being held on the social networking website forever. Contests in the vein of “images with most like win” or “comment with your answers” have been on Facebook ever since pages for businesses became a legitimate feature. Shocking as it may sound, till now this was an illegal mode of running contests. Pages were being able to get away with running promotions this way only since Facebook was not able to monitor all of them.

Facebook has also made another change in its Page Terms. Pages are no longer allowed to tag or encourage people to tag each other in content that they are not actually depicted in. So, when pages in India are running a Diwali contest a couple of months down the line, they will be prohibited from putting up pictures of products or fireworks asking users to tag their friends in order to win a prize. They will, however, be allowed to ask users to send in names for this product or interesting ways how they can be used as a message or comment to the page.

With businesses now being able to run contests by themselves, will this spell the end of professionals who once helped pages create contest and promotional apps? We doubt it. While small businesses will still manage to get away with these contests where entries do not exceed a few hundreds, it will be exceedingly difficult for bigger companies to be able to accurately monitor contest entries. If nothing, these professional agencies will be able to offer another service of being able to monitor manual entries within their bouquet of services.