Due to my internet saga with o2 I haven’t been able to write and publish much content lately. (By the way I am supposed to get everything installed on 23 September, so fingers crossed!)

There have been a few new things in the social media area that I’ve wanted to talk about, so today I am going to focus on the ‘biggest’ news of all - the new Facebook guidelines and rules for running promotions and contests. You could say that it’s not really news anymore, as it happened a few weeks ago, but it’s still worth discussing and providing some useful information to those of you who haven’t yet had the chance to familiarise themselves with the subject.

From now on Facebook pages are not required to use third-party applications to run competitions, promotions, draws or giveaways, but can simply do so on their Timeline, i.e. Wall.

Basically fans can now enter a contest or promotion by:

• liking a post;
• commenting on a post;
• writing on the page’s timeline;
• sending a message to the page.

Liking is now also considered a voting mechanism, so fans can simply vote on images or updates etc. with a like.

A few things you can’t use as entry (or voting) mechanisms are:

• asking fans to share your post or photo;
• asking fans to post something on their personal or friend’s wall to qualify for the contest or promotion;
• asking fans to tag your page in their personal posts;
• asking fans to tag themselves on your page’s photos.

What this whole thing means is that Facebook page administrators can now legally run promotions and contests on the platform without having to pay for third-party apps, but by simply posting a photo or text on their wall and asking fans to like it for example (that was illegal previously!). Indeed great news for small businesses that often don’t have the budgets to invest in external providers, but do their social media marketing themselves.

This is probably one of the biggest changes Facebook has recently done (considering that it does change its terms fairly often). I personally quite like it, because it would allow more page owners to run contests and would significantly reduce the number of illegal competitions. I’ve seen tons of contests that haven’t abided the official rules – either because people didn’t know about them, didn’t understand them (they were indeed confusing) or chose to purposefully ignore them.

Of course, using third-party apps hasn’t gone away; you can still go for it, if you want to (and if you can afford it).

To help you decide what the better option is for you, Antavo were quick to develop an infographic guide that clearly differentiates the two and provides pros and cons for each so that you can easily choose what works best for your page and why. I personally found the infographic very informative, so I advise you to have a closer look.

(Click on the infographic for a larger view)

Infographic by Antavo