With the rise and rise of social media, is connecting with audiences online something that has become:
a) crucial,
b) fun, or
c) the ultimate time-vampire?
Competitions, coupons, tie-ins, shout-outs… Cross-platform promotional activities abound, as writers and publishers seek to enhance audience engagement. Of course, the best way to shake your moneymaker is simply to provide meaningful content in a relevant forum – but a book giveaway doesn’t hurt as a simple ‘follow me and win’ strategy for getting more eyeballs.
So, are Facebook’s recent moves to further tighten the guidelines for competitions:
a) unsurprising,
b) evil, or
c) an author/indie publishers worst administrative nightmare?
See Galley Cat for all the details. If you can parse the basic rules for your fellow authors, please leave your highly valued interpretations here in a comment, and enlighten us all!
Have a great weekend of writing, folks.
3 comments ↓
I dunno…I was all set to be all upset about this — more restrictiveness from the companies that make squillions out of the addictiveness of being social. But it doesn’t look like much to be angsty about, beyond a bit of inevitable dumbing down. It looks to me like you can only allow people to enter a contest on FB by
1. liking a page
2. checking in to a Place (whatever that is…)
3. ‘connecting to your App’ — assuming you have one, which doesn’t seem likely for author contests.
Specifically you won’t be allowed to set up contests that you can actually judge on merit, like the best joke about spoons, or the best picture of a joke about spoons. Which seems a bit of a silly restriction, but probably, in the end, a time-saver, since there’s nothing to judge. Contests could only ever be won at random. Perhaps they’re anticipating being drawn into arguments (leading, since it’s Facebook, inevitably to face defacement) about whose spoon picture was funniest.
Most likely they’re just trying to say that if you want to run a contest, Twitter and blogs are your new best friends. Perhaps they’re just sick of all that revenue. Or, you know, they hate spoons.
Page defacement. I meant page defacement. Face defacement sounds a bit disproportionate…not to mention sort of tautological.
haha David, I like the term face defacement for this discussion
Thanks for this great interpretation. You’re right, the changes probably won’t have a big impact on authors and publishers, many of whom are already using twitter and blogs so effectively anyway.
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