This month there has been a lot of buzz about how some popular social platforms have made a few changes. Here is the latest as of August 2014.

Facebook to Disable Like-Gating

Last week, Facebook announced that like-gating will be disabled as of November 5, 2014. This gives you three months to finish out any current campaigns that require a “like” of a brand page in order to access special “brand follower content.” Although Facebook is still allowing and encouraging incentives in the form of sweeps and contests, all like-gates will stop working on that date so you can’t require fans to like the brand to enter.

Marden-Kane has found that most promotions our customers have run on Facebook have as much traffic to the mobile sweeps or contest web site where like-gating is not possible already, so this is not such a terrible thing. Removing the like-gate from a sweeps or contest will no longer bump up your follower numbers, but you can still encourage entrants to follow the brand for updates. You just can’t require a “like” to get an entry.

Pinterest Adds a Way to Private Message Users

Also last week, Pinterest announced Pinterest messaging. A new way to privately send a pin with a comment that only your intended recipient can view. They released this video to YouTube.

This is especially exciting for sweepstakes and contests since it means from now on we can privately contact winners as long as they are following your brand page. The build of a separate web site or application to collect winner contact information like email address or phone number will no longer be necessary.

Twitter Updates Analytics and Adds #LeadGen and #AppInstall Ads

Twitter quietly launched a new analytics dashboard that is accessible for free. This simple dashboard can give you performance statistics on every post you make. This is exciting news for anyone that ever used the old Twitter ad dashboard and hated it. Now it’s accessible even if you haven’t ever run an ad, and you can track every organic post you make to see which ones do the best.

They also just added some new ad units that are useful for getting sales leads (and sweepstakes entries!) and encouraging app downloads. These ad units are so much more than a simple tweet – they include a photo, a call to action and a field to gather a qualified email address in exchange for your download (app or file). This simple ad could be a new way to run a sweeps on Twitter and get email addresses for your mailing list in the process.

Marden-Kane can help you navigate your next promotion involving any of these platform changes. Give us a call at 516-365-3999 to get started.

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