Blue Helm

Facebook leaves us with...questions.

Facebook’s newly unveiled contest rules are, well, confusing. At least that’s the only determination I can come to today. That might change in the future as more information becomes available. But Facebook hasn’t released a lot of helpful instruction as of yet, so I’m left to ponder on the meaning and significance of the new guidelines.

In case you missed the announcement, administrators of Facebook fan pages can no longer host contests through their pages without written permission from Facebook. You can still use third party applications to host contests, but you can’t do anything now that requires users to become a fan, interact with a feed story or do anything else outside an application tab or canvas page in order to enter or win a contest.

So…what does all that mean? Facebook gives some examples of what you can and cannot do under the new guidelines, but many questions still remain unanswered:

• How are you supposed to contact Facebook to receive “written approval” to run a contest on your fan page? Facebook reveals very little, if any, legitimate contact information on its site. And even if you do contact Facebook through a message option, the company rarely replies.
• Can a business still give away products, promotions or coupons to customers that become fans of its page, even if no contest is involved? I think so, but Facebook doesn’t specify.
• Are there separate rules for contests on personal profiles? For instance, a blogger running a contest through her own profile page (as opposed to a fan page). Probably not, since a personal profile is part of the larger “Facebook Platform”. But the rules are still sketchy and open to interpretation.
• Why has Facebook changed the rules? Is it to protect itself from potential legal disputes arising from contest malpractice? Or does it just want more control over fan interaction with businesses on its site? Has a promotion gone wrong in the past?
• How will Facebook enforce these new rules?
• Doesn’t this just hurt small businesses? They can’t afford to hire large social marketing firms that specialize in creating third-party applications. Many small businesses rely on Facebook for promotions and contests that drive customers to their products.

Social media is like the weather–it’s always changing. So as always, Blue Helm will stay on top of Facebook’s new developments and rules. We live and breathe this stuff (so you don’t have to).