Facebook Bans Like Gating for Promotions

By: Jennifer French | In: Best Practices, Contests, Facebook, Legal and Prize Fulfillment, Marketing, Sweepstakes


Planning to run a sweepstakes or contest on Facebook in the near future?  There is an important change that you should be aware of before you proceed.  Today the latest Facebook change and how Facebook bans like gating for promotions, i.e. requiring people to like a page before they can enter the sweepstakes or contest.  Here is Facebook’s reason for the change.

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 Facebook’s aim to make sure that the almighty “like” retains its value.  If you are required to like a page for the purpose of entering a sweepstakes rather than being an actual fan of the page, it may tend to water down the user experience, which may equate to the user spending less time on Facebook.

Obviously, increasing your likes is still an important goal, so this just means you will need to think of other ways around the ban.  One idea is to offer a Facebook “like” icon on your entry page and gently invite people to like your page rather than making it a required step.

In addition to this major change, there have been other important changes within Facebook’s promotion policy that were rolled out throughout the year. This is why it’s imperative to hire an agency like Sync Marketing who specializes in promotion law to administer your sweepstakes and contests. At Sync Marketing, we stay up-to-date on all of these important changes and can help you formulate a plan to increase your reach on Facebook (and beyond) despite this new restriction and future changes.