Warning: 13 Ways To Get Your Winery’s Facebook Page Suspended

By Carin Galletta Oliver

Keeping up with all of the changes on Facebook can be a daunting task, but making sure that your winery is compliant with all of the promotional restrictions, design features and terms of use requirements will keep your page in good standing with the social network.

While the original restriction of involving alcohol as a prize is now lifted, current Facebook guidelines maintain that all promotions must comply with local laws and regulations of the jurisdictions where the promotion is open. The burden of verifying that a promotion is legal is in the hands of the winery and by running a promotion on Facebook, you confirm compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.

As painful as it may sound, loop your winery’s legal team into your Facebook marketing plans before you get too far into your planning. And make sure they are very familiar with Facebook’s promotion guidelines and terms of use.

Below, I’ve highlighted 13 little known Facebook participation requirements that many wineries (and other categories, you are not alone!) are violating on a daily basis. Don’t jeopardize your brand and all of the hard work you’ve put into building a relationship with your fans, by making these easily fixable mistakes.

At the end of the article, I’ve also included the link to the Facebook promotion guidelines, should you want to read and share them with your team.

1. 3rd Party Applications Required
   • Facebook requires that all promotions are run on 3rd party applications.
     • Facebook’s definition of a promotion is: “a contest, competition, sweepstakes or other offer” that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner determined on the basis of skill or on the basis of chance.
     • Either randomly choosing a winner or having them perform a task to win requires a 3rd party application hosted off the social network.
2. Facebook’s Native Features & Functionality Are Off Limits
   • Brands may not use any native Facebook features or functionality for promotions.
     • For example, you cannot have users “Like” your page to enter into a contest— the entry process must be performed within the 3rd party application and include a registration separate from the act of simply “Liking” your page.
3. Connecting with Winners
   • Brands can’t send a winner via a message, chat, or wall post alerting them to their win.
4. Use of The Wall
   • Many wineries are using the wall as the way to run a promotion. For example, “Comment below to win…” is not an acceptable way to run your winey’s Facebook promotion.
5. Voting
   • You cannot use the “Like” feature as a method of voting. Again, this type of functionality must be contained within a 3rd party application.
6. Secure Socket Layer
   • Although this won’t result in Facebook suspending your page, it will result in your custom tab(s) not working. Basically, they will be invisible.
   • All custom tabs must be hosted on a secure server. This means you will need to purchase a Secure Socket Layer certificate for your web server if your site doesn’t already have one. Make sure that any Facebook application developer is compliant with this requirement.
7. Age Gate Restrictions
   • If you have a wine, beer or spirits Facebook page, it must restrict users to 21 years or older. Any Page administrator can fix this in less than 5 minutes. Follow these steps:
     1. Go to your winery Facebook Page
     2. Click on “edit page” on the right hand side of the page>
     3. On the left, select “manage permissions”
     4. The “age restrictions” menu is a pull down menu. Scroll down to “alcohol-related”
     5. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and select “save changes”
     6. That’s it!
8. Third Party Advertising
   • We’ve only witnessed this once, but a restaurant displayed an advertisement on a custom Facebook tab for a spirits brand. While we think this is clever, it’s against Facebook’s terms of use.
9. Privacy Policy
   • If you collect information from your fans, you must gain their consent and tell them how their information will be used with a posted privacy policy. For example, if you run a promotion on the required 3rd party application and collect information, you must tell them what you are going to do with that data.
10. Personal Profile Page Used As Brand Pages
    • We are still seeing wineries use their personal accounts as their label page. An example, instead of using their name “Willy Winemaker” they use Willy’s Pinot Noir” as the name. Just create a brand page for your winery. It has a ton of advantages.
11. Violating Copyrights
    • Do not under any circumstance post content that has a copyrights that your winery does not own. Be careful of YouTube videos in particular because many times even though the video is under a creative common license, the maker may have not received permission to use the music. If you post the video, you are violating the music copyrights. Not something you want to have to explain to your winery’s legal council.
12. Promoting Underage Drinking
    • This rule applies offline as well, so it should be relatively easy for your winery marketing team to enforce. The best way for your winery to avoid any hint of impropriety is by placing the age gate on your page.
    • However, when it comes to photos of consumers drinking that you place on the page, be very aware of how old they look. We know you all do a great job of making sure no one is under 21 in your tasting room, but we’ve recommended to some of our wine clients that they remove photos from their Facebook page just to be safe.
13. Photo Tagging
    • Although a well-known brand used Facebook’s photo tagging feature in a genius way to reward consumers who tagged the item in the photo with their name to win the item, the page was shut down for violating the promotions terms and conditions.

Whether you manage your winery’s Facebook page or have hired a social media agency, it is important to be fully aware of the limitations and features of Facebook Pages.

Click on the highlighted text to read the Facebook promotions guidelines.