Hot off the press, Facebook has just announced an update to their Promotions Guidelines for all Facebook users. If you were not aware of them or even if you were, you need to read their policies in order to be familiar with them so you can operate within the rules and regulations of their site. The main difference however which will affect many companies is that you no longer need to obtain approval from Facebook to run a promotion hosted entirely within the realms of Facebook.
All competitions featured within Facebook, as per the previous terms, need to be created using a third party application (such as Wildfire) to run the promotion. Note also that the competition can only be entered by going through the canvas page of an application or via the applications tab on a Facebook Fan Page.
Some rules since the news release have not changed however. As per the previous promotion guidelines, no promotions can be held purely by asking users to write something on the wall, request they alter their profile picture, upload a photo or change their status. In addition, you cannot authorise a contest whereby users automatically enter by becoming a fan of your Page.
This guideline changes certainly lessens the administrative work required to run a competition. As before the competition would have been mentioned on Facebook with a link to a third party site and then both the website entrants and Facebook entrants would need to be notified about the results. Now the process can be internalised within the program making it easier to share the competition directly within friends and contacts on your Facebook page.
Note that when this article went to press, the current Promotions Guidelines had not yet been updated by Facebook.