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7 Facebook Contest Rules: Complete Guide for Businesses

7 Facebook Giveaway Rules: Complete Guide for Businesses 2024

Written By: author image Stacey Corrin
author image Stacey Corrin
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.
     Reviewed By: John Turner
reviewer image John Turner
John Turner is the co-founder of RafflePress. He has over 20+ years of business and development experience and his plugins have been downloaded over 25 million times.

Do you want to grow your Facebook page with a giveaway? Want to know the Facebook giveaway rules before you start?

Running a contest on Facebook is an excellent way to increase engagement and grow your audience on the platform. Yet, there are some rules you should follow to ensure your competition is compliant.

In this guide, I use my experience of Facebook marketing to share some critical Facebook contest rules and Facebook giveaway best practices you shouldn’t ignore.

Table of Contents

Before I start, let’s clear something up.

Are Contests Allowed on Facebook?

In short, yes! Contests are allowed on Facebook.

According to Meta, only Pages, Groups, and Events can run a giveaway, competition, contest, or sweepstakes. However, they ask that when you administer promotions, you should follow their policies.

What Are the Key Facebook Giveaway Rules?

Meta has several policies for running promotions on Pages, Groups, and Events. I’ve outlined the most important ones below to make them easier for you to understand.

Disclaimer: Since I’m not a legal expert, it’s always best to check the giveaway rules with your local authority before running any type of contest. For instance, rules in the United States might differ from other countries, etc.

1. You Are Responsible for Running Your Contest

Facebook giveaway rules for communicating a promotion

Before running your contest on Facebook, you must understand that you are responsible for lawfully operating it. This means that it’s your job to make the following details crystal clear:

  • Your official competition rules
  • Offer terms and eligibility requirements
  • Compliance with rules governing the promotion and prize you offer

It’s a great idea to create official Facebook giveaway terms and conditions to ensure your contest runs smoothly.

Your contest rules should include:

Remember to provide a description of the prizes in your contest rules. It’s important for people to know exactly what they can win. This helps them understand the prize value and ensures your contest complies with legal standards in various regions.

Also, in your contest rules, make it clear that no purchase is necessary to enter, and purchasing won’t improve anyone’s chances of winning. This transparency maintains fairness and clarity, ensuring all participants are on an equal footing.

To make these rules easy to find, consider creating a dedicated landing page for your contest. You can then link to this page directly from your Facebook giveaway post.

An even easier solution is to run your Facebook contest with RafflePress, the best WordPress giveaway plugin.

RafflePress comes with a built-in giveaway rules generator that allows you to create a detailed set of contest rules by entering some essential information.

Easily generate contest rules in seconds

You can then show the official rules right inside the RafflePress giveaway widget.

Giveaway rules in giveaway widget

2. Be Clear Your Contest Is Not Affiliated with Facebook

In addition to the rules above, Facebook requires that you make it clear your promotion isn’t affiliated with Meta in any way. This includes clarifying that “the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed, administered by, or associated with Meta.”

Facebook giveaway rules on required content

There are several ways you can tell participants about this, including:

  • Adding the release to your giveaway landing page
  • Including it in your official contest rules
  • Adding the disclaimer to a Facebook post promoting your contest

You can even use all of the methods above to ensure your audience is well-informed.

3. Know Which Contests Are Allowed on Facebook

Facebook allows you to run only certain types of contests on the platform. You’re allowed to run:

  • Giveaways where you draw the winner randomly
  • Contests where entries require effort and a judge draws the winner

However, you cannot run contests that require users to pay to enter, for instance, buying a ticket, as this falls under Facebook’s gambling policies.

To quote Facebook:

“Common types of gambling or gaming activities which may require permission [from Meta] include betting, lotteries, raffles, casino, fantasy sports, bingo, poker, skill game tournaments, and sweepstakes.”

Moreover, it’s important to understand the broader legal concept of ‘consideration.’ It doesn’t just refer to monetary payments but includes any exchange of value.

This can mean personal information like an email address or phone number can be a ‘consideration.’ Therefore, ensure your contest doesn’t fall under this broader category, which might conflict with Facebook’s policies and certain legal requirements.

Also, it’s important to know the rules and laws about contests where you’re holding yours.

Different places have different rules about what counts as a fair contest, especially when it comes to what participants need to do to enter. So, make sure your contest fits with the laws in your audience’s location.

Related: 11 Must-Have Facebook Marketing Tools

4. Do Not Require Prohibited Actions to Enter

There are several actions you cannot encourage participants to take during your contest.

According to Facebook:

Your promotion must not require or incentivise participants to share, repost, tag others or in any other way publicise your promotion.

In other words, this means that you can’t encourage people to:

  • Share one of your Facebook posts
  • Share your post on a friend’s timeline
  • Tag people in your post

While you may have been hoping to use some of these actions to drive more contest entries, you can use several other solutions.

For example, you can use a 3rd party giveaway app like RafflePress to run a Facebook contest. The giveaway actions comply with Facebook’s rules and policies by not requiring users to carry out Facebook tasks.

view facebook post or video entry action

For instance, with RafflePress, you can ask users to enter by:

  • Visiting a Facebook page
  • Viewing a Facebook post or video

The choice of liking your page or post is left entirely in the user’s hands.

5. Avoid Running Competitions on a Personal Profile

Given the complexity of Facebook, it’s easy to create a personal profile instead of a business profile by mistake. If you’re in this situation, it’s good to fix it before running your competition.

According to the Facebook contest rules, you can only run promotions and contests from a Facebook Page, Event, Group, or App. This means you can’t run a contest from your personal profile.

You can go here to create a Facebook Business page.

6. Get Permission to Use User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is an excellent way to generate interest in your contest and raise brand awareness. However, when collecting UGC, you need to ensure you have permission from the owners to use it.

Facebook’s data collection policy stipulates you should “obtain user consent for your use of the content.” In other words, make sure you get permission to use it first.

Facebook giveaway rules for data collection

Alongside getting consent for using user-generated content (UGC), consider publicity rights. This means contestants must grant permission for you to use their content in future marketing activities as well as the current contest.

This is important because it respects people’s personal rights over their images and stories. A simple way to do this is by including a clause in your contest terms where entrants agree you can use their content for promotional purposes.

For instance, you could write:

“All entries and any copyright subsisting in the entries become and remain the property of the promoter who may publish or cause to be published any of the entries received.”

You can easily add a consent checkbox to your giveaway with RafflePress. Just enable the GDPR consent checkbox setting and paste your terms and conditions.

RafflePress GDPR consent checkbox

As a result, when anyone clicks “agree” when entering your contest, they grant you their permission.

This step helps ensure you protect everyone’s rights. Then, you can use these entries to showcase your contest’s success and engage your audience in the future.

7. Facebook Will Not Assist With Your Promotion

The last of these Facebook giveaway rules is that Facebook will not administer your contest or assist. In addition, any Page running a promotion on Facebook does so at its own risk.

If you break any Facebook giveaway rules or any local laws for running contests, you cannot hold Facebook liable.

For example, in RafflePress, there are bonus giveaway actions to ask users to ‘like your page’ and ‘share on Facebook. However, since these actions go against Facebook’s policies, I recommend using them at your own risk.

Like on facebook to enter contest

If you go ahead and use them, both RafflePress and Facebook cannot be held responsible. The choice is yours.

Meta (Facebook) Giveaway Rules: FAQ

After looking at the rules for running a giveaway on Facebook above, you might have a few questions. I’ll do my best to answer your most pressing Facebook competition rules questions below.

Are Like and Share Facebook Competitions Allowed?

Facebook states that you cannot use personal timelines and friend connections to administer promotions.

Specifically, you cannot:

  1. Share on your timeline to enter
  2. Share on your friend’s timeline to get additional entries

Therefore, you should not run Facebook like and share contests.

Are ‘tag a friend’ Contests Allowed?

As stated in the Facebook giveaway rules, you shouldn’t encourage people to tag friends to enter your contest.

An excellent alternative to tagging is to use RafflePress’s refer-a-friend giveaway action. It asks users to share your contest on the social network of their choice, including:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
rafflepress refer a friend entry action

This is a great way to spread the word about your giveaway contest because it awards users with bonus entries. As a result, the more people share your contest, the more people will enter by sharing it.

Can You Ask People to Like Your Facebook Page to Enter?

Facebook claims that you can’t incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. Therefore, running a contest asking people to like your page to enter is also against the rules.

Instead, you can ask them to visit your page. Anyone who visits will like your page if they like what they see.

What Can Users Do to Enter Your Contest?

Even though there are several things you can’t require users to do to enter your contest, all is not lost! Here are plenty of things users can do to enter for a chance to win your contest:

The best part is enabling all of the above giveaway actions with RafflePress. You can offer participants multiple ways to enter right from your WordPress website.

rafflepress giveaway entry actions

How Do I Do a Contest on Facebook?

If you’re a WordPress website owner, the easiest way to run a Facebook contest is with RafflePress.

Its WordPress giveaway plugin has everything you need to make your contest viral. With several premade giveaway templates and an easy drag-and-drop builder, you can spin up contests in just a few minutes.

Publishing your giveaway is easy; use our WordPress giveaway block to embed our contest widget in any post or page. Or, you can create a standalone giveaway landing page to remove distractions and boost entries.

Here’s an example I spun up quickly on my test website:

rafflepress giveaway landing page

In addition, you can use the built-in winner picker to generate winners randomly and see which actions drove the most entries with our Giveaway Entry Report.

rafflepress giveaway entries report

Follow this step-by-step guide to learn how to run a Facebook Contest.

Or, if you’re ready to dive in…

I hope this guide helped you learn more about Facebook giveaway rules.

You might also like these Facebook giveaway ideas for inspiration for your next promotion. And if you need some Facebook giveaway inspiration, you can check out these excellent Facebook giveaway examples.

If you liked this article, please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for RafflePress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

author avatar
Stacey Corrin Writer
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.

Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.

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Comments

  1. Please can I ask my audience as a contest rule to make an order of a book for example, and leave a review?

    1. Hi Joy. Providing you don’t make it mandatory for people to buy your book and leave a review, it should be okay. However, if users MUST buy your book to enter the giveaway, it depends on your local rules and regulations. We suggest checking with your local authority to learn what is and isn’t allowed.

  2. Can I create a promotional ad on facebook that asks applicants to visit my facebook page AND comment on a post?

    Otherwise, how would you track who actually visited the site?

    1. Hi Jessica. Providing you don’t make it mandatory to leave a comment, we think you should be okay doing that. You can always check with Facebook support beforehand to see if they allow that.

      If you want to track who visited your website, we recommend using analytics tracking. That should give you a more accurate idea of who clicks your giveaway and visits your site. Here’s a beginner’s guide to installing google analytics.

    2. This is from the facebook meta website about commenting for competitions:
      “For example, businesses can now:
      Collect entries by having users post on the Page or comment/like a Page post”
      So yes they you can ask them to comment on the page or a post.

    1. Hi Jean. It’s best to check with Facebook’s guidelines or contact them directly to confirm this.

  3. Hello, I have a question:

    Is there any way to post about the contest publicly, but also publish the contest files privately? In essence, what I mean is a person wants to enter and visits my page. The person clicks to enter the contest and they get the “sorry, this page is only available to people who ‘like’ this page.”

    I know that’s an extremely technical way of going about it, but it does seem like that’s a legitimate optimistic attempt.

  4. So if a 501(c)(3) nonprofit is allowed, under its own state rules, to have a raffle, can it be mentioned on Facebook, with those interested directed to the nonprofit’s website for details? (I see groups doing this, just odn’t know if it’s “legal” with Facebook or not?)

    1. Hi Judith. This is something you’d have to check in with Facebook about. Since we’re not legal experts, we’d hate to give you any misleading information.

  5. Can we have people who spend $25 at our shop be entered to win a contest? The prize is worth $75. Every $25 spent is an entry to win.

  6. Can I give away a monetary/cash prize running a facebook sweepstakes? Are there any known limitations to this?

    Under their terms it says the following, which is not completely clear. Is money considered a physical good”?

    “You are not permitted to give away physical goods in connection with any promotion. You can offer virtual gifts, for example, to celebrate special occasions, such as reaching a follower milestone.”

    Thanks!

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