In August, Facebook announced that it would no longer allow businesses to “ facebook like gate ” their pages, forcing thousands of companies that run “like-gate” contests as regular promotions to rethink their social media marketing strategy on Facebook. It will be officially put into place on November 5, 2014.
How should businesses now focus their efforts?
Obtaining likes is ideal, but it should not the end-all, be-all to your social media strategy. A more meaningful goal is to get real fans to engage with your brand. As Facebook stated in its announcement:
“You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a 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.”
Our recommended best practice is that businesses should be collecting actionable and valuable data such as emails, customer feedback…anything that is critical to their goals. If the customer wants to like your Page as well, that’s great, just don’t force them to.
Replace Like-Gating to Action-Gating
Like-gating may be dead, but you still can ASK for likes (you just can’t require them to enter a contest this way). The benefit to this change in Facebook Policy is that people who are liking your Fan Page, are doing so because they are genuinely interested in your brand.
As an alternative, we have added a Facebook Suggested Like Entry you can add to your contest. This will ensure that those who like your Page, do so because they have it in mind to interact with your brand and help you organically grow your audience engagement, not just gather contest-generated fans that liked your page simply for a chance a win a prize.
With Rewards Fuel, you’ll be better able to direct followers across many different channels to a single campaign. Let us know how we can help you in the comments below!
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