Facebook Changes Its Promotions Policy Again. Caribbean Brands take note

Facebook has announced yet another update to its promotions policy. The major change in this that, from now on, there is no longer a requirement to obtain approval from Facebook to run a promotion entirely within Facebook. However, brands do still need to comply with Facebook’s promotions guidelines and use a third party application to run their promotions or face their Fan Pages be shut down.

Here’s the breakdown

What has changed

* Previously, in order to run a promotion inside of Facebook,a brand had to either obtain explicit approval from a Facebook representative, or else your promotion in two parts by publicising it in a tab on Facebook but administering it (collecting entries, conducting the drawing, judging winning entries, or notifying winners) off of Facebook.
* Now, there is no need to obtain approval to administer the entire promotion inside of Facebook, so users participating in your promotions can do so entirely on Facebook. This is great news because generally promotions that are run entirely in Facebook have better conversions (i.e. higher entry rates) and higher rates of sharing (via newsfeeds and friend invites) .

What has not changed

* All promotions still need to be be in line with Facebook Promotions Guidelines. This means all promotions must still be administered through a 3rd party developed application on the platform, and can “only be entered by going through a location on the Canvas page of an application in Facebook or on that applications tab on a Facebook Fan Page.”
* This means that, as before, no promotions can be run simply by asking users to write something on the wall, alter their Facebook profile picture, change their status, or upload a photo.