Facebook has decided to ban contests that incentivize social media engagement such as liking and sharing via rewards programs.
Their reason:
Image obtained with thanks from Jakob Steinschaden on Flickr.
To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.
Is that their real reason? Or are they trying to get rid of another alternative to paid advertising on Facebook?
Is Banning Giveaways A Fair Move? Are They Doing Any Harm?
People will like or unlike pages as they please. They aren’t forced on them, so there is no issue with legitimate giveaways.
Today, advertising is targeted by location, likes, and users’ activity online. This involves constant tracking of users’ every move, which involves running apps in the background on smartphones while consuming their battery life due to their GPS and Internet activity. This is something that many people find offensive. Giveaways are a simple and fun alternative to that.
To users of Facebook, giveaways and contests are one of the most entertaining promotion methods. It not only engages them, but it isn’t as annoying as the sponsored posts and advertisements that they have to see every time they log in.
The Impact Of Banning Giveaways
There are websites which were built on giveaways, and have thousands of happy followers, such as Grab The Games. This ban would put them out of business and everyone would end up with more sponsored posts, advertisements, and spam too, because those are the alternatives. In my opinion, Facebook needs a much better reason than the one provided to put people out of business.
As is the case with all promotional methods, there is a right and wrong way to do it. Facebook should discern between the inappropriate and legitimate giveaways instead of banning all of them.
Source: Facebook.
