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Cheating in Facebook & Twitter competitions

By Spark and Fuse on March 26, 2012

We watch prize promotions on both Twitter and Facebook with great interest. While our primary goal is to educate companies that prize promotions have to be run to ASA/CAP code,  we’ve actually witnessed some very interesting events unfold. We’ve seen how some people are able to cheat and equally how easy it is to be exposed as a cheat. Di Coke, has been entering and winning competitions for 14 years, and has posted a very interesting blog on this subject which we think is definitely worth sharing.

Cheating in Facebook & Twitter competitions

I blog about competitions because I enjoy it. I’ve seen how comping can change people’s lives and I want to encourage more people to get involved with this amazing hobby. I want my blog readers and Facebook friends to experience the challenge of entering, the nervous anticipation, and the huge excitement if you’re a winner. I want to show promoters what a joy it is to host a creative promotion and what great interaction you can have with the fans. I try to stay upbeat about my hobby, but recently that’s been getting more and more difficult. I didn’t want to waste my time blogging about cheating, but I know that hundreds – possibly thousands – of you will read this blog post, so I should take advantage of this captive audience to warn you about what’s going on.

This post has been in progress for some time, but the sheer volume of cheating on Facebook and Twitter recently has regrettably made it more urgent for me to put this information where people can access and share it. Cheats using multiple profiles, and those who pass off others’ work as their own, are ruining our hobby and giving compers a bad name – and it’s up to us to try and stop it. Before I begin, I must stress that not EVERY voting, referral or photo competition is won by a cheat – but there ARE an awful lot of dishonest folk out there who will stoop very low to try and bag a prize.

Compers need to be on guard and not be afraid to Report/Block if we find someone cheating. We also need to warn promoters about what’s going on! When you see that dreaded status update ”We thought it would be fun for our Facebook fans to choose the winner by voting….” then it’s time to act. Many agencies and promoters are still very naive and believe that their super-duper fun new Facebook competition will be won by someone who plays fair, when unfortunately that isn’t always the case! Promoters – scroll down to the bottom of this post for advice on running a fair competition that won’t be targeted by cheats.

So what’s the truth? There are thousands of people out there tricking us, many of them sitting happily on our friends list, clicking on all the competition links we share, then going on to win prizes by deception… read more here

Comments:

  1. [...] • People hate to see cheats winning, so it pays to take steps to prevent them from entering, and also take accusations of cheating seriously – read my blog post about cheating here [...]

    Pingback by Competitions - a winners perspective | Spark and Fuse — August 1, 2012 @ 11:13 am

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