Are you unknowingly breaching Meta’s terms of service running competitions or giveaways?
Running a competition or giveaway on Facebook & Instagram is a tempting tactic to grow your followers, reward your community and build brand awareness. However, many business owners are unaware that specific rules govern how these promotions must be run.
Administering a promotion incorrectly can lead to more than just a policy violation. It can negatively impact your data quality and your future advertising performance.
Here is a guide to running safe and effective promotions on Meta platforms.
The “Don’t”: Tagging as a Condition of Entry
I see this happening all too often asking followers to “tag 3 friends” to enter a competition or giveaway and ‘the more you tag the more entries you will receive’. While this tactic often spreads a post quickly, it actually violates Meta’s guidelines.
The Policy: Meta’s policies explicitly state that “Personal Timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions.” This means you cannot ask users to:
- “Share on your Timeline to enter.”
- “Share on your friend’s Timeline to get more entries.”
- “Tag your friends in this post to enter.”
Don’t believe me? You would be forgiven since it seems Meta isn’t terribly diligent about enforcing it!! However you can see it here in black and white for yourself Meta Pages, Groups and Events Policies (See section: Promotions)
It’s also not just about breaching Meta’s terms of service that can make an impact on your account.
The Impact on Organic Reach: Beyond the rules, these tactics are often flagged by the algorithm as “engagement bait.” If the system detects that your engagement is being forced rather than genuinely growing your following, it may reduce the reach of your future organic posts. This means your loyal followers might stop seeing your updates in their feeds.
The Data Challenge: Engagement Quality Matters
Another significant challenge with broad “Like and Share” giveaways is the quality of the audience they attract.
When you ask for low-effort engagement, you often attract “prize hunters” who have no genuine interest in your specific product or service.
Consider this, if thousands of these users engage with your post, they become part of your “Engaged Audience” data. This creates two problems:
- Organic Reach Dilution: These new followers are unlikely to engage with your regular content. This signals to the algorithm that your content is not relevant, potentially over time reducing its visibility as it is deemed low value.
- Paid Advertising Inefficiencies: If you later run paid ads targeting say a “lookalike or retargeting audience” based on your page engagement and followers, the system will try to find more people like the prize hunters. This can result in wasted ad spend on an audience that is very unlikely to convert into paying customers for your business.
The Security Risk: Impersonation Scams
A growing issue for businesses running public competitions is also the rise of fake profiles. Scammers often create pages that mimic your business name and logo (e.g., “YourBrand_Winner”). They then reply to comments or DM people that have interacted with or been tagged on your competition post, pretending to be your business telling entrants they have won and asking them to click a malicious link to verify details.
To protect your community, avoid announcing winners by replying to their comments. Instead, state in your original post that the winner will be announced in a separate, dedicated post and that you will never ask for bank details or credit card information to claim a prize.
This is one of the biggest reasons why I recommend avoiding
Summary Checklist
To ensure your promotion is compliant and effective, you can follow this simple guide.
❌ The DON’Ts
- Do not require people to share the post to their personal timeline to enter.
- Do not require people to tag friends to enter or gain additional entries.
- Do not run a competition on your Personal Profile. It must be administered on a Business Page.
- Do not give away generic prizes unless you sell them. Offer your own product or service to ensure you attract potential customers rather than just prize hunters.
✅ The DOs
- Do include a release of liability. You must state that the promotion is “in no way sponsored, endorsed, administered by or associated with Facebook or Instagram.”
- Do include a link to official Terms & Conditions. This is often a legal requirement and helps clarify the rules for entrants.
- Do consider using an entry mechanism that benefits your business in the form of purchase or growing your database with their email. This allows you to build an customer list you own, which in turn become high quality audience pools for ads targeting.
Lastly it pays to check in from time to time on Meta’s terms of service, as they update this regularly.
