Last month we posted this quote about the infamous and highly successful Ikea Facebook Tag campaign:
Some of the best campaign strategies are simple, and none simpler than using the default “tagging” tool on facebook to help create a bit of buzz for an online competition. People were told that the first to tag their name on any item, would win it. (quote from: Digitalbuzzblog)
Ever since we got numerous requests from clients and others to come up with some kind of similar concept to promote their brands or products. Although we do think the Ikea was one of the smartest campaigns ever to be executed on Facebook and we did develop some differentiated but similar concepts our answer has been, is and will be: ” NO, we can’t. It’s ILLEGAL!”
“Illegal you say?” Yes, illegal and could and probably will result in Facebook blocking your brand page. Forever! You should not want to take that risk.
What happened? Well, all that happened is that Facebook has changed its policies on promotions last December. You’ll find the new Facebook Promotions Guidelines here. Long read and complex legal mumbo jumbo, but a must if you consider using Facebook for your marketing programs.
InsideFacebook quoted a Facebook spokesperson on the Ikea campaign as:
For example, a few weeks ago, an Ikea store in Sweden ran a promotion on their Facebook Page in which users who tagged photos of furniture with their names first won the items as prizes. A Facebook spokesperson told us today that the promotion was indeed in violation of the new policies and would not be allowed to run today.
Now what’s illegal and in violation of these new policies? Illegal and ban worthy are all promotions that requires a user to;
- tag themselves in the photo.
- to change their status in any way
- to change their profile picture
- to answer a question in a status update
- any kind of response in the status
- like a photo or an update
- add friends
- respond with a photo not in a specific application
And last but certainly not least all promotions need to run through an application that does not use any of the basic functionality of Facebook.
Does that come across to you as Facebook took away all the fun? It shouldn’t and it didn’t to us neither. We’ve been developing and building a variety of great, funny and very successful Facebook certified promotions after these new policies came to be. Also with some smart thinking and the skills or our engineers we build clever simulations that generated the same effects or even better.
So be advised, do read the new Facebook policies on promotions and contests, and do play it Safe! There’s a lot we still are allowed to do; give us a call and we’ll show you some of our pretty smart solutions, but do not start promotions or contests similar like this or ban doom will be upon your Facebook brand page:
