Allison Hendrix, from Facebook's Platform & Promotions Policies team announced yesterday that you can now administer a promotion directly from your Page. This means you can now have people:
- submit entries by liking or commenting on your post
- submiting entries directly on your Page
- submitting private entries by messaging your Page
You can now announce winners directly on your Page Timeline, so you can have them come to your Page at specific time for winner announcement.
Please note that personal profiles are still forbidden to administer promotions on their Timeline. Also, this policy does not affect your current promotion.
Here are few options how you can use this change in Promotions Policies:
- it's now OK to use Like plugin as voting mechanism
- you can enable people to post entries to your promotion directly on you Page (e.g. post a photo of you from your vacations where you enjoy your favorite <brand> to get a chance to win <prize>)
Note that you cannot encourage people to share the post for entering the promotion or to tag themselves in a photo where they are not actually depicted in.
The reason why Facebook decided to change the policy is clear, to enable all businesses, especially from the category of small and medium, to create promotions which doesn't necessarily need to cost thousands of dollars. And when you save on creating a promotion, you can spend some more on advertising 
Brand's Image vs Spam
Beware that this means lot of spam in your News Feed. To ensure good user experience, please think twice if the promotion you are planning will help your brand or will hurt it. In short term, it may help you increase engagement, but often promotions may be considered as spam and result in losing fans. Facebook recommends to use promotions to build awareness for a new product or promote new location opening.
Apps Killer?
It's awesome that Facebook is opening a brand new space for your brand and it will be interesting to see brands coming with most creative ways to leverage that. But what about the apps, it this an app killer? We don't think so. Administering promotion on Facebook is low cost marketing, but brands who would like to engage with their fans will take their time to create an app which will tell them more about the user (e.g. email address, Pages he/she likes, etc.) and take advantage of this in future marketing campaigns.
Also not all apps on Facebook are promotions. Many of them are utility apps, like Poll, or games, like Train Station. Brands will continue to create apps, but now, they are also able to create one day promotions for almost no cost.
Advantages & Disadvantages
Please check out our list of advantages and disadvantages of promotions run on Page and via app.
Promotions on Pages:
- PROS
- quick to create (from idea to launch)
- increase engagement (People Talking About This)
- cheap
- can be done internally
- mobile friendly
- CONS
- hard to administer (getting information who liked the post, manually gathering entries from comments, messages and fans' posts)
- no contact information on entrants (to send them email about winners or new promotion)
- basic stats
Promotions using apps:
- PROS
- easy to administer (everything is organized, random picking winners script, etc.)
- easy to contact winners and other users (user database with contact information e.g. email, address, phone no., and any other required information – what user likes, where he/she lives – for targeting purposes)
- stats of whatever you want
- using Facebook API
- CONS
- expensive
- takes long time to design and developer
- usually requires external digital agency for marketing & development
- requires optimization to be mobile friendly
If you have more information about the update, please contact us at contact(at)kremsa.com.