Can I require facebook likes as entries for my giveaways?

Many people hope to build their Facebook followers via their giveaways. And they absolutely can—but they can’t require Facebook likes as a means of entry. Here’s why…

Facebook’s Rules

About two years ago, Facebook instituted a rule around its “likes”:

You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page.

This means Facebook began banning “like-gating,” or requiring likes of your Page in order to get something. Unfortunately, that also includes banning likes in order to enter a giveaway. You can’t require Facebook likes as a means of entry.

What This Means for You

If you’re using Promosimple to build your giveaways, you don’t have much to worry about: We’ve taken this rule into account.

While you can still encourage people who enter your giveaway to like your Facebook Page (and you should!), that entry will always be optional. It will look like this:

you can't require Facebook likes for giveaways

For simplicity’s sake, you’ll still see the Facebook Like option within the “Additional Actions for Entrants.” But when you add it to your form, it can’t be required, and it won’t confer additional entries into your giveaway.

Workaround Attempts You Should Avoid

We’ve also seen people use our forms, but add language like “You MUST like our Facebook page to enter.” This implies that they require Facebook likes for entry (in spite of what the giveaway form says), and that’s absolutely against Facebook rules.

We strongly, strongly discourage this; just adding this language means that you are violating Facebook’s policies and are in danger of having your page suspended.

We’ve built our forms to comply with policies, and we’ll continue to update them to comply with any upcoming policies, but you could still find yourself in trouble if you try to cheat the system in the wording on your form or the way you promote your giveaway.

The best way to stay on Facebook’s good side and keep your Page live and working is to comply with all of Facebook’s policies.

You can certainly use your giveaway form to encourage people to like your Facebook page, but you won’t be able to require it.

In the end, the goal is that your Facebook page is only liked by people who are really and truly interested in you and your business/blog. And that’s a good thing anyway, isn’t it?