Paid for Facebook Page updates - OK or not OK?

Paid for Facebook Page updates - OK or not OK? - article content

Following the recent Ad.ly case and its issues with Facebook status update, the question comes up in mind – are paid for Facebook page updates OK or not OK?

Well for a user, it is quite clear, the policy on Facebook says in section 4.2. of Rights and Responsibilities, that: "You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser). ". That is clear, and it is obvious why Facebook has it there.

But what about a Facebook page? Can a Facebook fan page get advertisers? Obviously if you are a celebrity and you have a sponsor in real life, why wouldnt you have the option to promote it? This is not clear, and Facebook itself hasnt cleared this just yet.

Facebook has previously banned upon many occasions spammy generic Facebook pages that used themselves as a communication channel to sell ads = now that is wrong. From our experience (note: we cannot prove this by referencing to any rules for now), if you are a company and offer a service, you link to a partner and are getting paid for it, that`s OK. But if you start offering it as a service basically to “push status updates” across multiple pages, typically subject like this do get banned eventually. Typically that would be the case if some large Facebook pages would get bought / sold like that.

We even saw cases where the person who was running the Facebook Pages for some large brands opened a webshop for the brands, and eventually (obviously!) got banned.

We think Facebook should clearly state what is OK, and what is not OK.

One thing is for sure – Ad.ly is probably just in the gray zone, but are the ones doing it quite nicely, so it would make sense for Facebook to allow things like this, but we will see!