Real promotions shouldn’t ask you to share a Facebok post – here’s why

We’ve covered fake competitions on Facebook rather extensively over the last few years. Those competitions that ask users to like and share a Facebook post to their timeline to win a prize that in reality doesn’t exist.

Most of these fake competitions exist to either lure users into spreading a Facebook post (known as Facebook like-farming) or to lure users to external websites belonging to spammy marketing companies (survey scams.) Or both.

Of course many genuine businesses do turn to Facebook to promote real competitions. The social networking site offers a number of legitimate avenues that allow page owners to carry out promotions with the aim of raising their profile and increasing their follow count.

However, making a post asking Facebook users to share it to win a prize isn’t one of those avenues. That’s why genuine promotions rarely ask you to do it and scam posts nearly always ask you to.

We do, from time to time, see legitimate – yet demonstrably misguided businesses – asking you to share a post to win a prize. So here is why genuine promotions shouldn’t be asking you to do that (and if you’re a business owner, why you never should.)

A page admin doesn’t know who shares their posts.

Let’s start with the most obvious reason why not; page admins can’t see the users who do share their Facebook posts.

Well, at least not all of them. A Facebook user can see if their friends shared their post, and can also see those users with public privacy settings applied who have shared their post. For everyone else (non-friends with appropriate privacy settings) you simply cannot see (and have no real way of determining) if they have shared a post.

Given that rather inconvenient fact, if you do happen to stumble on a Facebook post asking you to share it to win a prize, then…
– The promotion is either a scam and there is no winner
– The promotion is only going to pick a winner with open privacy settings (don’t do it!)
– Sharing the post is completely redundant and the winner is picked using some other kind of metric (for example, if you registered for a competition on a website.)

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It’s against Facebook’s terms of service

Since page administrators don’t necessarily know if someone has shared a post, Facebook don’t want promotions asking users to do that. As such, it’s against their terms of service.

Personal Timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “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).

Of course, promotions that flout this rule risk being penalised, by having their posts removed, or worst case, having their pages taken offline (though this is extremely rare.)

Facebook’s algorithms may target these posts

This is one that business owners need to keep in mind if they’re thinking of creating a promotion – because there is plenty of spam masquerading as competitions on Facebook all imploring users to share a post, the social networking site tries to block posts that it deems to be spam.

And if a business owner creates a Facebook post imploring others to share it to win a prize, it may receive reduced visibility on peoples newsfeeds as Facebook identifies it as spam.

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Facebook posts that ask you to share it to win a prize are probably scams. If they’re legitimate promotions, they shouldn’t be doing it, and the chances are that if it is legitimate, there will be some other way to register for the prize outside of sharing it. Most valid promotions request you to register your entry onto a third party website (but be aware of spammy survey scams wanting you to sign up for stuff my giving away all your personal information!) and it is this registration that enters you into the competition, not by sharing a post on Facebook.