Award winning financial adviser and Managing Director at Merideon Wealth Strategies, Mark Rattigan tells how he had his Facebook page deleted TWICE for not adhering to Facebook's Competition and Promotion Guidelines.
We hear people going on and on about Facebook's rules but you rarely come across anyone whom has actually got their page deleted, so they just keep doing the wrong thing.
Maybe after listening to Mark, you'll have a double think about running your next competition on Facebook.
Listen to the interview by pressing the play button below.
(Please forgive the bad audio on our side, you can hear Mark nice and clear though, which is what matters most :))
Alternatively scroll down for the transcript.
Transcript:
P: Hi everyone it's Phillipa Kiripatea here from Social Divas with our first interview of our social media interview series. Now I've got Mark Rattigan on the line whom is an award winning financial adviser and managing director for Merideon Wealth Strategies.
Hey Mark How are you today?
M: Very well thank you.
P: That's good. Now before we get started into the questions about your Facebook page, can you just tell us a bit more about your business?
M: Yes sure, we're a financial advice business located in Mandurah, WA. We've been operating for about 3 years now, we provide financial advice on a fee for service arrangement for our clients. Our clients range anywhere from people working up in the mines making some good money through to young families and retirees. Covering insurance, superannuation, investments and general financial planning and strategy.
P: OK all the important stuff, leading us up to retirement, is it?
M:Yes that's right. Helping people reach their financial goals and protect themselves from unfortunate circumstances.
P: That's a good service you're offering. Now Mark actually found us through a blog post of ours, I think it was The Do's and Dont's of Facebook Competitions where we told you that you can't tell people to Like your page in order to enter your competition and using Facebook functionalities in order to run your competition, and Mark commented on our post saying that he's had his Facebook page deleted twice, because of running a competition.
And we've had a lot of people ask us to tell them about someone that has actually had their page deleted because most people haven't known someone whom has actually had their page deleted by Facebook.
So Mark, tell us about the competition you ran.
M: Yes sure. Initially when we first started the business we put up the Facebook page and thought, let's try and get as many people Liking us as possible, go a little bit of a ground swell and get our name out there before we launched. That went quite well.
We offered a dinner voucher for the person who referred the most people and we offered a dinner voucher for a random person who became a fan of our page by a certain time.
It did really well I think we got up to 160 - 170 people liking our page.
Then it basically got taken off us. I logged in one day and the page was missing, had no notification, no idea what had happened. I thought it must have been a bug or an error on Facebook's end.
I followed up, sent an email, tried to do some research into what had happened and couldn't come across any answers and never had a response back from Facebook.
Simply the page was missing. So after trying to track it down for a few days and looking into it for a week or so, I decided to start again and just start building the page up.
Yes and when you started again, you ran the same kind of competition. That's when it got deleted again?
M: Yes so it was about 6 or 12 months later, I can't think of the exact time frame.
We got up to about 98 fans, this one took quite a bit longer the second time around obviously because you get that initial momentum. I don't know if it's the fact that people didn't realise or thought because they had previously Liked it, so why are we needing to Like it again?
So yeah it did take a little bit longer, it got to about 98 then I put up a post saying when we got to 100 we'd give away a dinner voucher again, and basically the next day it was gone.
So the first one took a while to disappear, the second one, basically the day after it disappeared again.
So at that point I started talking to some people I knew that knew a bit more about Facebook and they basically explained that it's due to us not following the competition rules that we would've been taken off.
Since then in my research I've found out that once the computer's picked you up the first time you actually get monitored by a human being so they monitor you closer from then on.
P: Hmm yeah because once your page has been deleted from Facebook they won't give you any explanation as to why it's deleted, they'll just delete it and you have to figure it out for yourself. If they [Facebook] deleted it or you did something wrong, you don't really know.
So how did you, in that 6 - 12 months you were building your page up again, were you spending a lot of time on it, working on it and trying to build up that momentum again? So where you spending a lot of man hours on the page?
M: Yeah well on the second time around, the first time was more hype and we had a couple of people trying to win the competition so we got a lot of local people who just Liked the page to win the competition.
The second time around we didn't go as aggressively to get that initial rush, we did more inviting people that were previously on the page and try to expand it more slowly that way and build it up more organically I guess.
Not realising that we were kicked off for running a competition we were not weary about it at that stage. I guess it was more organic rather than that initial influx of people so it did take a little bit longer to get the people back again and as I said I found that the people that initially joined, it was a lot harder to get them to re-Like the page a second time around.
P: Yeah so it would have been pretty frustrating, especially when your page was deleted after all those months of trying to get that momentum up again and trying to figure out what to do on Facebook anyway, to have your page deleted - that's all your hard work, all your efforts that you've put into it just wiped out and now you've had to start again.
M:Yeah and then the third time around we decided instead of just trying to flank it and get as many people interested on the page, we're just going to target people who are interested in what we're doing so we've just taken a more conservative approach and built it up based on asking our clients to Like the page, asking people that have other contact with us through other means to Like it and just posting a lot of information so people that are interested are following the page and interacting rather than just random strangers who were probably never interested in our service in the first place.
I can see on your page now you have 74 people Liking your page, that's mainly your clients and other people you've come across?
M: Mainly contacts and leads, so people that have been to our seminars or we've had initial contact with some other way.
We're trying to get them through the page so we've got that constant contact with them.
Sounds like we've just had two new ones joined today, we only had 72 yesterday, that's a good sign.
I guess it's more of a natural way now, asking people to Like the page, asking if they're interested in it rather than just getting them to Like it to win a competition.
Have you thought of running a competition for your current clients and your current contacts?
M: I haven't had time to look into how to do it properly, I know there is a big list of terms and conditions and I think you have to download some apps to have it all set up, so no I haven't.
I've avoided it up until this point, as I said I've just been looking at adding useful information on there so I'd benefit that way rather than run competitions, but it is something we would consider. I just haven't had time to look into it and how to do it properly.
OK, so what would be your best advice for those business owners whom are currently running the types of competitions that Facebook doesn't allow, and also those whom are thinking of running one because they see everyone else doing it? What would your advice be to them?
M: The problem is, I've been giving advice out freely to everyone I talk to that's doing it, but nobody's prepared to listen because their thing is 'well everyone else is doing it so therefore I can do it'.
I guess, if you get away with it, great, if you don't get away with it and once you've been caught out the first time, they're obviously going to be onto you more and more focused from then on.
So we're more careful now about what we do. I guess probably run more professional ones if you do it properly, then you don't have the risk of Facebook kicking you off, and you're probably going to get much more benefit out of it by doing it properly anyway, because the apps and that collect details and those sorts of things.
I think doing it properly, if you can't do it yourself, make a point to see Social Divas. Getting someone who knows what they're doing to do it properly for you, I think that way you'd actually get more focused results out of it and you avoid the issue of getting into trouble.
P: I was just laughing before when you were saying how you give out advice freely and telling people about your experiences about having your page deleted, but, they're falling on deaf ears because people don't want to listen, they just want to take the easy way.
I think with your interview, now that it's going to be spread out people might actually think twice running a competition wrong because they can hear an actual person telling about their experiences rather than me just telling people that you're going to kicked off without any actual back up there.
M: Yeah that's right, it does actually happen and I wish I had known about it the first time.
P: OK Mark it's been great speaking with you, I think that's all the questions that I had for you today.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
M: No I think that's fine. I think Facebook is a useful tool but I think people waste a lot of time doing the wrong things on it so I think it's important to have a strategy with it and it's not just about quantity it's about quality of the people following you I think and the interactions that they provide more-so than sheer numbers.
So I think having that strategy now that's what I've learned out of the experience is how to have a good strategy while you're spending the time doing this and make sure you're getting something back on the investment of your time or your money.
P: Yeah that's great Mark. For those of you who want financial advice, want to set up a self managed super fund or work out your life insurance or get help with your tax investments and investing in general, head over to www.facebook.com/merideonwealth or the website is www.merideon.com.au. Thanks Mark.