No likes allowed: Facebook’s competition rules that no one seems to know about.

Did you know if your business breaches the rules surrounding competitions on Facebook, they can just shut you down? No warnings. Just no more business page.

Heavy threats indeed, so it must be really, really important to Facebook that you stay inside the rules. What makes it so interesting is how few business owners, and even big advertising agencies know there are any rules at all. It’s true. We should all be reading the fine print and it’s embarrassing when you see big players in the market blithely in breach of the rules. (Without wanting to get anyone in trouble, check out the promotion this big brand has been running).  But Facebook has made little effort to warn people signing up for business pages that there are rules, especially ones with such hefty consequences.But the crux of the rules are that you can’t make use of Facebook’s native features in your competitions: no voting with a ‘like’, no ‘first one to comment’, no ‘post your photo to our wall’. You also can’t imply that Facebook has anything to do with the competition and there has to be an explicit entry into the competition, so no ‘like our page and be into win’.The way around it is to host your competition through an application like Wildfire. These apps cost money, are often clunky and constrictive, and make the competition more complex to enter. But you have no choice. Facebook sez so. A tab for your competition will appear pretty seamlessly in your page’s nav bar like the ‘WIN’ button on Air New Zealand’s page.So Facebook, where is the big button saying “rules for competitions” on business pages? Where’s the friendly email welcoming new business pages owners and gently pointing them to the guidelines? Do you WANT us to break the rules?The conspiracy theorist in me can’t help but wonder whether it’s just more convenient for Facebook if businesses don’t know. After all, the more rules we break the more scope they have to shut down pages they don’t happen to like.