On August 7th, Facebook quietly announced a major change in their platform policy that is set to go into effect starting on November 5, 2014.
Announced on their developer blog, the change in the Facebook platform policy will affect third-party apps-more specifically, their use of the Facebook Like Button when it comes to using it as a ‘Like Gate’.
The entire change can be read below:
You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page.
It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app’s Page.
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.
It’s a lot to take in and may be a bit confusing to understand what is and what is no longer acceptable, so let’s break it down:
You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page.
This means you can no longer incentivize people to click the Facebook like button (on your actual Facebook page) or the Facebook Like social plugin (the button you can embed on your website).
The most common incentive was to “gate” a contest or sweepstakes on your Facebook page, so people had to click the Like button in order to access it.
The functionality to Like Gate or Fan Gate content has been removed by Facebook for all new apps—all current apps have until November 5th, 2014, to comply with the new policies.
It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app’s Page.
This is where things can get a little confusing.
You can still incentivize people to log in to your app, check in to a place, or enter a promotion on your app’s Page. What is considered an acceptable incentive?
Asking people to like your page is still acceptable; you just cannot require it, and you cannot give them anything in return for it (like an extra entry).
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.
This makes sense. Facebook no longer wants people gaming or ‘devaluing’ the like button, as they prefer to have people like a page because they actually want to connect and hear from a business.
This should have been the case from the start, but it took a while for Facebook to finally enforce against people liking pages for artificial incentives and not actually engaging with pages.
In fact, back in February of 2013 we wrote on the topic of running giveaways on Facebook and why it should be avoided. You can read that article here: Stop Running Giveaways on Social Media! Run Them on Your Website.
One key point in the article was to focus on quality over quantity by not forcing users to perform actions:
If you use ‘like-gating’ (forcing people to like your page before they can enter a promotion) you are just reinforcing the social illusion as discussed above. While you may still be able to convert a few of those likes into customers, you need to remember that it’s about quality, not quantity. Don’t force people to like something. If they like it, they will do it on their own.
It looks like this is the route Facebook has chosen take, but it seems like it could be too little too late.
The organic reach of page posts have greatly diminished, so, unless you’re willing to pay to play, we’re predicting that Facebook will become less of a marketing asset for businesses to focus on.
What should you work so hard to gain 5,000 or 10,000 likes, when only a few hundred of those people will actually see your posts, unless you pay to “boost” your posts?
Meanwhile, high-quality journalism is taking over your News Feed with those ‘Five Great Secrets’ articles, without paying a dime… but we digress…
We’ve preached this from day one, and we built ViralSweep based on this: collect the email address first, everything else should be second (likes, followers, etc).
With an email address you can always reach out to that specific person, but with a Facebook like you don’t have their information, and with the direction Facebook is going, they probably won’t see your posts either.
What does this mean for ViralSweep?
ViralSweep was never built on top of Facebook as an app, and we never allowed you to require users to like a Facebook page in order to enter a sweepstakes. It’s not something we felt comfortable with.
Instead, we’ve always allowed you to incentivize people to like your Facebook page with a bonus entry only after the user entered your sweepstakes.
Even though liking a page is not mandatory and is completely optional for the user to do, we can no longer offer bonus entries for liking a page, as this is now against Facebook’s policy which states that we cannot “incentivize users to like a page.”
So instead of your sweepstakes awarding bonus entries (left), starting November 5th, it will just show the Facebook Like button without a bonus entry awarded (right).
We’re not sure what difference this will make, but it will be interesting to see what direction this takes marketing via Facebook.
