Contests
Social contests are promotions targeted to your social media audience, using your social media channels to communicate and facilitate the entry mechanism. They include simple giveaways and sweepstakes. They also include more sophisticated contests such as photo contest, where a user enters by using a specific hashtag.
They’re a great way to engage your audience, can help to build your email list, develop your community and positive brand perception.
It's beyond the scope of this document to detail the legal considerations when running contests on social media to ensure that it complies with applicable criminal, gaming, and competition law. Bahrain has yet to implement any social media specific governance. However, each social media platform does have specifications for running contests, which must be fully understood and complied with.
For example, until August 2013, Facebook prohibited contests that employed Facebook functionality as part of the contest’s operation, including method of entry. After Facebook eliminated these prohibitions, companies were allowed to structure contests so users could enter by liking a post or commenting on a page. Facebook still maintains a handful of terms which must be complied with when administering a contest, including:
- Brands may not require users to like a page to enter, but sending a message to the page is allowed;
- Brands are not permitted to require users to tag themselves in content they are not actually depicted in;
- Asking for users to “share” posts is a violation of the terms of service;
- The inclusion of a complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant and an express acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed, or administered by, or associated with, Facebook; and
- Brands are prohibited from running contests on personal timelines or requiring users to share on their own timeline to enter or tag friends in a post to enter.
Twitter does not frame its terms of service relating to contests as conditions of use, but rather as “simple guidelines to follow to ensure your contest doesn’t ask anyone to violate any of Twitter’s rules.” These guidelines are more specific than Facebook’s terms, so administrators should be sure they are aware of them in advance of structuring a contest using Twitter. Twitter’s guidelines ask contest organisers to:
- Discourage users from creating multiple accounts in order to enter a contest more than once.
- Because creating more than one account by the same person may violate Twitter’s terms of use and may cause those accounts to be suspended, Twitter requires that a contest organiser’s rules expressly state that anyone found to be using multiple accounts to enter will be disqualified from contest participation;
- Discourage multiple posts of the same tweet in order to enter a contest. Posting duplicate, or near duplicate, tweets violates Twitter’s terms of use and Twitter may block contests if they encourage duplicate tweets as a means of entry or enhancing a user’s odds of winning;
- Refrain from asking users to include an @reply to the contest organiser, because it can lead to compromised search results when filtering through mentions to select a winner; and
- Encourage the use of topics relevant to the contest. Using mentions and hashtags on unrelated topics may be deceptive and therefore violate Twitter’s terms of use.
For further information and to ensure that your competition is in compliance, please use the links below.