After years of preaching the importance of running a campaign on a third-party application, Facebook has lifted its promotional guidelines. It is now possible for page admins to create and run promotions directly on the Timeline. As we suspected, policing approximately 15 million business pages to make sure they were running promotions according to the rules became too much to handle. We’ve had a lot of clients ask us, what does this mean for my business page? The truth of the matter is we are still big advocates of using third-party apps to run a promotion, the main reasons being:
- All of our templated apps include a fan gate so users have to “Like” the page to reveal the content, helping to increase your fan numbers.
- You can integrate a lead capture form directly on Facebook and use the email addresses collected to contact your fans outside of Facebook.
- You can include an opt-in form to help build your email list.
- Apps are a nice way to tie in your website branding and add trackable links back to your website.
- The app houses links for terms of use, privacy policies, and the required Facebook disclaimers so they don’t have to be included in your posts.
- Apps can encourage fans to share the promotion on their own profiles or with friends, where Wall posts running a promotion cannot.
If you are interested in running a Facebook campaign or special on Facebook using an app, take a tour of our templated Facebook applications here. If these don’t quite fit your needs, we can always create a custom application for you.
If you’ve used a third-party app to run a promotion, share your experience in a comment below. We’d love to hear from you!
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