Facebook recently updated their policies for promotions and sweepstakes and there are two important changes for brands to know.
First, promotions run on Facebook must be located “on an application box in a tab on a Facebook Page” or “on the canvas Page of an application on the Facebook Platform”. Secondly, there is a new requirement that all promotions must be submitted to Facebook at least 7 days prior to the start of the promotion AND receive Facebook approval. This means that brands will no longer be able to run promotions and sweepstakes within the News Feed. These changes to the Promotion Guidelines are very much in line with a very important Facebook goal: improving the quality of the Facebook environment.
All of the recent Facebook changes are an attempt to streamline the Facebook feed and improve the quality of the user’s experience. With such massive and global adoption, the Facebook stream has become cluttered. We all have Facebook “friends” that we haven’t spoken to in ages and with whom we rarely if ever interact. The Live Stream gets filled up quickly with updates that just aren’t meaningful to a user and reduces the quality of the Facebook experience.
E mail is another communication channel that has had to deal with this very issue. Facebook is attempting to proactively deal with its own version of junk mail and spam and re-launching the News Feed as an algorithmically determined summary of what is important to a user based on which friend or brand that user interacts with the most which could end up being a huge benefit to Facebook users.
Clearly Facebook will need to continue tweaking the algorithm as many users have been vocal about their displeasure with the change, but as Facebook continues to improve this area and as users grow more accustomed to the experience, the News Feed could be a positive development for users. Facebook should be commended for focusing on improving the quality of the user experience.
So how is this change related to the change in the promotions policy? And what impact does this change have on brand marketing on Facebook?
Previously brands were allowed to run promotions with very little regards to the quality of the promotion. Even low quality promotions were guaranteed to appear in a user’s stream. Many promotions have been wildly successful at gaining fans but have had the side effect of cluttering up the stream. While this offered an essentially free marketing channel to brands, it did very little to improve the quality of the Facebook ecosystem.
While some brands have stuck to using the least costly methods of fan engagement, Facebook has seen other brands invest in creating high quality promotions and applications that users want to interact with often. Facebook recognizes that its very existence depends on creating a high quality user environment.
Facebook is the platform, but without content that users want to engage with on a regular basis, it would become less valuable over time. By requiring brands to run promotions via the application box on a Facebook Page or on the canvas Page of an application, Facebook accomplishes two goals. First, it helps to keep the stream clean. Second, it signals that Facebook is committed to Pages building app-based promotions. If your promotion is of low quality and not engaging (i.e. not created in a way that Facebook users want to interact with it), it is unlikely that your promotion will make it into a user’s News Feed. That means that brands must be willing to invest heavily in building really cool promotions and apps if they want to effectively market to Facebook’s 300 million users.
Facebook’s recent changes to its promotions policy coupled with its recent efforts to clean up the stream will go a long way toward improving the quality of the user experience. As a brand, you must ask yourself if you are ready, willing and able to build a high quality Facebook presence?
