You’ve undoubtedly seen the so called ‘like gates’ where people post an intriguing picture or video, and when you click on it, you are told you need to ‘like’ a page before it will be displayed. They have been used for building up followers on Facebook for quite some time now by many marketers, but that will be coming to an end very soon.
According to an update on the Platform Policy, you are no longer allowed to require a user to like a page in order to gain access to specific content, contests, apps, a reward or anything else. The policy goes into effect on November 5th. At that point, any ‘like gates’ that Facebook is aware of will be disabled.
Effective immediately, marketers are no longer able to create ‘like gates’ for their materials.
Facebook posted this about the change, “You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, check-in at a place or enter a promotion on your app’s Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.”
This will be a big change for many who like to use this proven strategy to build up likes on Facebook. One likely reason that this change has been made, however, is that many marketers were using deceptive practices to try to get more likes. For example, they would often post an image that appears to be part of an extreme video (either provocative or disturbing or otherwise enticing). People would click on it to see the rest, and even after they ‘liked’ the page, the video would either not exist at all or not be what the individual was hoping for.
Have you used ‘like gates’ in your marketing? If so, what do you think of this change? Please share in the comments below.
