People love to do contests on their websites and that is great! In fact, we are hosting a contest on our blog to give away a $15 Amazon.com giftcard for the top commenter for this month. The problem is that many people do not know what they should and should not be doing on social media sites.

To help you protect yourself, here are twenty random things you need to do to do contests right on social networks. Let us be clear that it is always best to go to the social networks’ terms of use as this is NOT an exhaustive list by an means and only focuses on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

1. The reason for all of this worrying is that laws are different in every state of the United States and even more so in other countries. The simple solution is to not allow it. The governments’ worry is that contests will be rigged and this will promote money laundering.
2. Contests, giveaways, and sweepstakes are all different things. Some social networks allow one and not the other.
3. All contests should have a terms of use and privacy policy accompanied with it. That is a general online law, regardless if you host a contest on a social media site or your blog.
4. If you do not know the rules and still do contests wrong on social media sites, you could be not only banned from the network, but also fined.
5. Twitter is the most liberal and allows contests.
6. You can find Twitter’s contest rules here.
7. Unfortunately, between of the limited amount of characters, you cannot get the rules across, so provide a link back to a website with the full details.
8. Encourage your Twitter followers not to create fake accounts to win the contest.
9. Request that contestants provide an @reply back to you so that others do not see your contest tweets as spam.
10. Google+ does not allow you to run a contest solely from their website.
11. Here is Google+ rules for contests.
12. To properly do a contest on Google+, you need to physically host the website on another place, most likely announcing the contest on your profile and then linking back to your website for details.
13. You cannot do anything that involves their +1, including how many people +1 your link or update.
14. Facebook is the most strict of these three. They have removes many businesses from their network, so be careful.
15. You can use a third-party app on Google+ to host the contest and many businesses have done it successfully, but there are not a lot of online resources about the Google+ app or how to create third-party apps for contests.
16. Here is Facebook’s policy and guidelines.
17. You cannot use any parts of Facebook for a contest. This includes. “Like our facebook page to enter a contest” or “Leave a comment to enter to win ________.” Illegal.
18. The previous one includes having the Facebook Like button on your own blog. You are still doing it wrong.
19. You cannot use “When we get to XXX number of followers, we will give away something.
20. You can create a custom page within your Facebook page that is hosted on a non-Facebook server. Unfortunately, this takes resources, programming knowledge, and lots of time!

With these twenty tips, will you be doing a contest with the help of social media or because of the endless rules, will you avoid everything accept linking to your website?