Earlier this week, Facebook threw a curveball to companies using fan pages to promote their business. Up until now, an integral part of attracting fans and encouraging participation, on a large number of fan pages, has been creating fun contests and promotions for fans to participate in. Facebook has now made this a nearly impossible task.

According to new guidelines posted on November 4^th, the following are the basic dos and don’ts of Facebook contests:

• You cannot:  Condition entry in the promotion upon a user providing content on Facebook, such as making a post on a profile or Page, status comment or photo upload.
• You can:  Use a third party application to condition entry to the promotion upon a user providing content. For example, you may administer a photo contest whereby a user uploads a photo through a third-party application to enter the contest.
• You cannot:  Administer a promotion that users automatically enter by becoming a fan of your Page.
• You can:  Only allow fans of your Page to access the tab that contains the third-party application for the promotion.
• You cannot:  Notify winners through Facebook, such as through Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles or Pages.
• You can:  Collect an address or email through the third-party application for the promotion in order to contact the winner by email or standard mail.
• You cannot: Instruct people (in the rules or elsewhere) to sign up for a Facebook account before they enter the promotion.
• You can:  Instruct users to visit the third-party application to enter the promotion  Since users must have a Facebook account in order to access an application on the Facebook Platform, if you give this instruction, they will be prompted to sign up for a Facebook account if they do not already have one.

As you can see, these new regulations significantly hinder companies, especially small businesses, from taking full advantage of the Facebook platform. We are currently trying to get to the root of these changes and figure out Facebook’s motivation behind them. In the mean-time, please leave your thoughts and comments about the changes and what it could mean for businesses.

-Rusty
@RussWalters