A recent article from Mari Smith highlights the dangers of putting all of your marketing eggs in the Facebook basket.
Imagine for a moment that you’ve started a Facebook Page, added an attractive landing tab and started building a fan base. You decide to run a competition offering a prize for the best photo uploaded to your Page or profile wall. You get a great response with lots of photos and comments. Just when it seems that your Page is starting to work it, along with all your fans, disappears, removed by Facebook for violating their Promotions Guidelines.
Sound like a nightmare? It is and it could easily become a reality.
According to Mari, Facebook has recently changed their Promotions Guidelines banning competitions or giveaways that are conditional on someone becoming a fan or contributing content through the news-feed of a personal profile and fans Page. There are ways to legitimately run a competition but it involves using a third-party application and getting approval from a Facebook account manager; and that’s cumbersome.
Facebook, it appears, are justifiably concerned. News-feeds are being choked by businesses attempting to create interactions and build their fan base through the overuse of Wall-based competitions. What, then, are the options?
It’s important that marketers be more creative with what they share through their newsfeed. With competitions now effectively off-limits content that’s interesting, entertaining and valuable becomes more important than ever.
More importantly though this change demonstrates that placing all your marketing efforts on a platform that you don’t own is risky business strategy. With a simple change in policy or guidelines platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter, can effectively undo all of the hard work put into building up a fan base or following.
That’s why it makes sense to build your own assets via a website, blog, feed subscribers and an email database. On those platforms you’re the one that makes the rules.
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