Interesting post today from Social Media Examiner, and I think I need to share this, if only so that I can better understand what’s what with giveaways.

Evidently it’s not as easy to do giveaways and promotions on Facebook, and in general there are a lot of guidelines to follow – which I think most of us small businesses do, just as a matter of ethics. Requiring people to “like” a page or become “fans” or do anything changes the rules and makes this a contest, as opposed to a give-away. If you read the comments in the article on Social Media, you’ll find a lot of confusion, especially as regards to doing this on Facebook.

When you read the “Promotions” guidelines on Facebook, (and we’ve all done that, right???), you’ll notice that what many of us have been doing doesn’t seem to fit those guidelines. I think most of us with some sort of fiber giveaway to celebrate milestones – a certain number of fans, reaching a major number of blogs – do so with pure intent – like this and you could win something. We just need to be aware of what we’re doing and make sure everything that we need to do according to federal guidelines, we are.

It’s similar to the FTC guidelines about bloggers promoting an item where they receive a commission – we need full disclosure that we get paid to do this. If you start looking at your spam, you’ll notice a lot of it doesn’t have actual names and addresses at the end of emails to tell you exactly where all this is coming from. More and more sites (mine included) let you know that there are products we promote for which we may receive a commission. That’s how affiliate marketing works, and that’s a great source of passive income for many of us.

So here’s what I’m going to do. When I hit a milestone that I’ve set, I’ll do a giveaway of goodies.  I’ll mention on Facebook that it’s happening, but you won’t need to do anything except head over to read the blog – which hopefully you’re doing anyway.  Any giveaway will run solely through my blog – after I continue to read up on the in’s and out’s of this. I’m interested in your thoughts on this topic.

Boring, huh?  Here’s some eye candy to make up for it (although ya gotta admit this is important information). Enjoy the marbled papers.

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