By Heather Lopez

I just received notice that Facebook is repealing the no contests or giveaways rules they instilled in November, which means that small business owners will again be allowed to run contests on their pages. For info, check out this post.

Previously, you had to spend $10,000 in Facebook advertising to get the approval to run a contest on your own page. Unless you used an expensive third-party app, this meant that small business owners were out of luck, while big brands could continue to thrive.

With this news, it seems like small business owners and Facebook might be on a path to making up. Facebook already offers so many cool apps that you could virtually host your website on your fanpage, including having a store tab to sell items at no charge and a product review tab as well.

This news will help us improve the promotional options we offer our clients because now we do not have to refer them to third party apps unless it will better meet their needs. However, for small businesses, comment contests seem to be really effective at getting new fans. Page owners should be wary though of the kind of fans they may be attracting. They should offer up prizes that would only be useful to their target audience, to try to weed out those who just enter contests and don’t really plan on interacting.

Comments are always appreciated, so tell me what your opinion is on using Facebook for small business.

UPDATE: Apparently you still need to use 3rdparty apps or set something up with coding on your own page. Comment games & similar techniques are still not permitted.