There are many apps out there which incentivize people for sharing or liking a page. Although facebook mention in there platform policy:
You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page.
So Facebook does not care about that? Or have those apps a kind of contract that allows them to do so?
According to the Facebook policy (https://developers.facebook.com/policy/) which states
"Only incentivize a person to log into your app, enter a promotion on your app’s Page, or check-in at a place. Don’t incentivize other actions",
inventivizing people for sharing or liking pages is not allowed.
However, incentivizing people to check-in at places, seems to be no problem even though these posts are similar to normal shares!?. One of the most popular apps where this is possible is Swarms / Foursquare (https://www.swarmapp.com).
Related
We are working on ideas to provide an extra incentive for people to become and stay fans of a company Facebook page (on top of truly being a fan of course). some sort of loyalty program, if you will.
We are wondering if this is a technically and Facebook Platform policy-wise feasible idea.
The loyalty program would be an app that you can log in to with Facebook and that will see if you like a certain company page and since what date.
Is this something that be read using Object Likes?
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.3/object/likes
If possible, we would like this information to raffle prizes among users that have liked that company page a certain amount of time. Is this something that would be against the Facebook Platform Policies?
https://developers.facebook.com/policy/
Section 4.5 says: "Only incentivize a person to log into your app, enter a promotion on your app’s Page, or check-in at a place. Don’t incentivize other actions."
It's not entirely clear if a setup as descrivbed above counts as "entering a promotion on your app's Page"
Any input on this would be well appreciated.
You can only read the Page likes with /me/likes, and you need the user_likes permission. You are not allowed to incentivize liking a Page. Like Gating is not allowed and you will not get user_likes approved for that.
Meaning, it´s not allowed and not even possible to reward users in any way for liking a Page. Users must like a Page only because they really want to.
This is a very interesting question! but actually I see no violation in doing so ... as I understand from your Question, it's not like you're buying the likes, but you're rewarding your fans - some sort of loyalty program - you also maintain your current fans and nothing wrong in that!
But seriously I understand your concerns about getting rejected by Facebook .. and I can't confirm you can pass the Facebook Review with this scenario!
So my advice to you is "try to build a prototype and submit it for reviewing" or "try to contact anyone from Facebook Support Team and validate your scenario with them".
Please share the updates with us :)
I was wondering whether it's allowed or not to have a FB app, which would eventually post into user's timeline(on behalf of the user) some user related stuff(which doesn't matter at this point) and also a logo(image) of one of the app's sponsors??
Would this app still be in compliance with FB's policy?
I've read the FB's policy already, but i'm not sure if it's very clear to me, whether it's allowed or not.
thx a lot.
I don't think this adheres to the Facebook platform policies:
https://developers.facebook.com/policy/#control
Specially points 2.1 - 2.3 and 5.4 might be interesting:
2.1. Obtain consent from people before publishing content on their
behalf.
2.2. Use publishing permissions to help people share on Facebook, not to
send people messages from your app.
2.3. Don't prefill captions, comments, messages, or the user message
parameter of posts with content a person didn’t create, even if the
person can edit or remove the content before sharing.
5.4 Only incentivize a person to log into your app, enter a promotion on your app’s Page, or check-in at a place. Don’t incentivize other actions.
I'm getting constant alerts about the primary purpose of the app redirecting people off the Facebook platform. The entire app takes place within the community and even finishes by asking the user to return to the timeline. Would someone be able to shed light on the conflict. The app is a voting competition: http://bit.ly/UlsterWeddings
Any help would be greatly appreciated. The alert is below.
THE ALERT: Your app appears to have a Canvas integration that redirects people away from Facebook. This violates Facebook Platform Policy 4.8: "Don’t build an app whose primary purpose is to redirect people off of Facebook." In order for us to consider your appeal, your app will need to stop redirecting users off of Facebook.
I've received this alert as well, as have many other developers who are discussing it in the Facebook Developer Community group on Facebook.
Just so we are all on the same page with respect to terminology, "canvas" refers to application web pages displayed in an iframe on facebook.com with the Facebook chrome/navigation elements surrounding the app's page content. Facebook restricts some api methods to only being available on canvas pages, and prohibits unapproved advertising providers (read: Adsense) on canvas pages.
From what I've gathered, today Facebook deployed a new automated policy enforcement script which is why many apps are seeing this alert just now. In typical Facebook fashion, no useful actionable information is provided. The policy itself has not changed, but I was advised to review this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYcxyh5HQSI#t=94
The final example in the video is of a user clicking on a link from a post in their stream. In the example, clicking the link takes the user to an off-canvas page. I was told by a Facebook policy employee that this is specifically what my app is doing in violation of the policy.
My conclusion from this is that Facebook have ratcheted up enforcement and significantly tightened up their interpretation of the policy: if your app allows the user to make a post while they are on a canvas page, any links in the post must go only to canvas pages. That is my interpretation which seems to follow from what you see in the video, and from what a Facebook policy enforcement employee told me.
This is a huge departure from past interpretations of the policy. I am guessing that thousands (tens of thousands?) of Facebook apps violate this policy as it is now being interpreted. I for one shall be abandoning canvas and going back to a simple website with Facebook integration.
Hope someone out there knows the answer to this, the tab app was working fine when in testing but when live facebook is not including whether the user has liked the page or not in the signed request?!
It was working fine when in development mode :(.
Like gating is not possible and not allowed anymore, see changelog: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog
The 'liked' property will no longer be returned in the 'signed_request' object for Page Tab apps created after today. From November 5, 2014 onwards, the 'liked' property will always return 'true' regardless of whether or not the person has liked the page.
They also change the platform policy:
You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app's Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.
I am importing the posts and comments in my FB fan page to my custom website. I am importing using graph api. In the response array I am getting two types of action URL for "comments" and "likes".
See below :
http://www.facebook.com/149263441795729/posts/240758399312899
Using this link in following code
<fb:like href="http://www.facebook.com/149263441795729/posts/240758399312899" width="450" height="80"/>
I get the following error
The page at http://www.facebook.com/149263441795729/posts/240758399312899 could not be reached.
How can I like these posts or comments from my website? Is there any solution for that?
I think--I'm no expert here--that redirects such as this are controlled by Facebook, with a cross-site scripting policy file on their servers that say whether or not they will allow redirects and to who. On my website for example I allow anybody to cross link, since I'm just a little guy, but I bet Facebook only allows it with preferred partners like various corporations, see the story below. That would be my best guess.
Paul
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/09/15/facebook-may-be-adding-cross-linking-to-foursquare-yelp-gowalla-and-more-on-pages/
Facebook may be adding cross-linking to Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and more on Pages
Facebook appears to have added cross-linking between Pages and other location-based sites like Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and SCVNGR to its Pages, reports Scribbal. Tech evangelist Robert Scoble posted a notice on his Google+ profile earlier today that indicated a new partnership between Foursquare and Facebook as the Page for a place was shown to direct viewers to the comparable location on Foursquare.
The links appear off to the left underneath the ‘Like’ count and checkin count on a location’s page. The only question that remains is whether the users are activating these connections themselves or if it is something that is done automatically. This could be Facebook’s plan to integrate itself with other location sites now that it has distributed the Facebook Places features throughout its framework.
Facebook has been on a tear lately, adding the Subscribe button and smart Friends list features just this week, as well as Facebook integration into the new Skype for Mac. It is clearly making an effort to maintain its lead over Google+ as the preeminent social network and it doesn’t want lack of features to be a reason for anyone to quit it.
We have reached out to Facebook about this new feature and will update this post when we hear back.