5 Top tips for Social Media Promotions

PromoVeritas

Running a Social Media promotion?

Social Media platforms are a quick and easy way to set up prize promotions. However they still need to be run fairly and compliantly, with both local laws and best practices, and the various, often complex rules of the individual social media platforms.

Here are five tips to stay out of trouble as supplied by PromoVeritas, the global promotional compliance experts:

  1. Know the rules
    The major social media platforms are constantly updating their functionality and promotional policies. So ensure you keep an eye on the rules as each platform is different.  So Facebook for example  say ‘Promotions may be administered on Pages or within apps on Facebook. But Personal Timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions (eg: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries”, and “tag your friends in this post to enter” are not permitted).’
  2. Terms and Conditions
    You must have a solid set of T&Cs that cover all those facts likely to influence participation as well as ensure compliance with local laws and protect the Promoter. In addition, any promotional post, or teaser advert, should reference the fact that T&Cs apply, ideally with a link to them.
  3. Data Extraction
    To be fair and compliant you must be able to prove you have selected winners from all entrants. It can be tricky to ‘scrape’ data such as Likes and pictures on some social media platforms after promotions have started, e.g. on Twitter you can only extract the last 120 comments. So it is important to use forward planning and specialist software to enable full data extraction.
  4. Winner selection
    All promotions, regardless of size or prize value, should be run properly. The UK CAP code requires promoters to have independent third parties overseeing the random selection of prize draws, the judging of competitions or the distribution of Instant Win chances.
  5. Announce the winners
    This is a big part of promotional compliance and a sure sign that you are running things fairly. If you don’t do this your audience will ask questions. Each platform has different functionality for communicating with users. Ensure you state in your Terms and Conditions where the winner’s list is, so it is available for anyone to read.

Read the full article in PR Week here. For more information on PromoVeritas and running promotions contact Gemma Cutting on info@promoveritas.com  or call +44 (0)20 3325 6000.

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