Social media promotions are rife with pitfalls

Facebook changed its rules on running competitions and prize draws in August to make it cheaper and easier for businesses to use.

At first glance, running a promotion on social media platforms appears simple. Business accounts are free and can be set up in moments, enabling anyone to reach more than 18 million people in the UK with a Facebook ID or the millions of Twitter and Pinterest users. However, each of these channels has serious limitations.

Facebook’s decision to remove the need to run promotions via an app will make it much simpler for brands to run prize draws and competitions. Brands can now ask users to ‘like’ a page to enter a prize draw, message a brand, comment on their pages, or ask users to tag themselves in photos.

However, Facebook competitions will remain targets for ‘scampers’ – those seeking to win dishonestly. A thousand likes can be bought online for about $20. Even if manipulation is obvious, promoters need to deal with it carefully. The ASA recently castigated one brand for disqualifying people who appeared to buy votes because the terms and conditions did not prohibit it.

Although running some type of promotions on Facebook can invite exploitation from fraudsters, for other types of activity, the immediacy of Facebook can make dealing with a crisis easier.

The Kumala wine brand recently ran a prize draw promotion, but due to an error, they awarded more prizes than intended in the initial stages of the promotion. A potential disaster was averted because the brand took positive and immediate steps to communicate the issue on Facebook and to say it would honour all prizes awarded. It also responded to entrants’ questions directly, quickly and openly, limiting reputational damage and helping generate goodwill.

Twitter also poses challenges. The 140-character limit does not excuse promoters from communicating terms and conditions of entry. Rather than tweet each term, brands should make clear conditions apply and link to them using a short URL.

Another difficulty with Twitter promotions is ensuring that the entrant is actually from an eligible country of residence. Extracting data into a format that allows you to choose a winner is a further challenge, as is finding a way to notify winners without attracting fake prize claims. Pinterest, which is increasingly being used to run competitions, shares many of these challenges.

Twitter is also increasingly used to carry branded messages. These are in effect adverts, and any brand that uses employees or brand ambassadors to tweet about a promotion in a professional capacity must ensure the public are clear it is an advertising message to avoid breaching ASA rules. Wayne Rooney and Jack Wilshere were found to be hiding paid-for advertising messages as personal tweets when they tweeted about an activity being run by their sponsor, Nike. The hashtag #Ad helps solve this problem.

Creating deeper engagement is not as simple as it seems. Our advice? Run the promotion on a platform you control and use social media to drive traffic.

Jeremy Stern is MD of PromoVeritas