Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/163731
40 Information Technology maltatoday, SUNDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 2013 Facebook promotions Conrad Bugeja Building up your 'likes' on Facebook is important as it will help you generate more leads and customers. Facebook houses over one billion people from all over the world and is the place that we go in contact with friends, family, share photos, stay updated and socialise. With social media you can create exposure and reach thousands of users by creating posts or contests that can go viral. Running promotions on Facebook is a common practice for businesses to increase the likes on their company pages, since they are more likely to go viral. A promotion is a contest that you may run on your Facebook page, offering back a prize to your fans. In the meantime this results in your contents in going viral and increasing the number of likes on your page. This is one of the major objectives of most businesses as fans are highly likely to convert to customers and recommend your products. Facebook promotions are most commonly run through a third-party app which has the functionality to administer the contest. To create a third-party app you require the help of a developer to get it going. However now Facebook has updated their guidelines for promotions and a third party app is not a requirement anymore. Now business can in fact use the Facebook page functionality such as comments to cre- ate a contest. These competitions were somewhat common, however prior to these updates these contests did in fact break Facebook's guidelines and could lead to having a page terminated. Now businesses can collect entries to a contest by having users posting on the page or even commenting or liking on a page post. Entries to a contest can also be collected by users using the page message functionality. Finally the like function can be used to count votes. This creates new opportunities for businesses, especially small businesses, where they can do without third party app costs. However administering contests from the page functionality can be challenging at times and can mess up the page timeline layout. These more flexible guidelines however now have included tagging guidelines. The guidelines now prohibit from pages tagging users which they are not shown in. Such as tagging users to a promotional banner or telling users to tag themselves to this promotional banner is not allowed. It is also important to note that contests must be run on the page timeline and not on personal timelines. For instance asking users to share a post on their personal timeline/wall to enter in a contest is not allowed. These new guidelines are definitely a huge relief for marketing and business owners! Now with some creativity you can have a contest running. This doesn't mean that contests running from apps are go- ing to die. Both will exist and both are to be used to one's advantage. You can create simple contest using a page post, which, due to the interaction from several users, can get the post viral. However you can create much more interactive and complex contests using a Facebook app. Conrad Bugeja is an SEO and PPC Consultant in the Internet Marketing division of Alert eBusiness (www. alertemarketing.com) Events HSBC Malta's Summer Staff Party 2013 From left to right: Josef Camilleri, Astrid Micallef Saliba, Ranjit Gokarn, Doriette Camilleri, Chris Bond and Glenn Bugeja From left to right: Denise Cordina, Jonathan Attard and Daniela A Anastasi From left to right: Simon Law, Amanda Castillo, Charmaine Cutajar, Samantha Hollyoak, Maureen Micallef, Amanda Mifsud and Nadia Micallef From left to right: Franco Aloisio, Ranjit Gokarn and Joyce Grech From left to right: Antoine Xuereb, Jurgen Agius, Tonio Mallia, Maureen Micallef and Chris Bugeja From left to right: Elvia Jacono, Ernest Agius, Mary Grace Borg, Inika Axisa and Jesmond Apap