Facebook privacy and verifying likes for competitions

mymble · 27 September 2013 at 1:54PM

Sorry if this has already been discussed but I couldn't see it mentioned anywhere...

My facebook privacy settings are set so that all my "likes" are private and only I can view them. (I do this because my friend's news feeds were being bombarded by my hundreds of likes activities) When a company asks me to like their page to enter a competition, I do but as far as I can tell there is no way for them to verify if I have, since only I can view what I've liked?

Do you think this potentially disqualifies me from those competitions? I'd like to find out because otherwise I'm wasting a lot of my time

Does anyone else keep their likes private?

emmaglet · 27 September 2013 at 4:32PM

I don't...but a really long winded way of doing it would be for you to "like" a FB page I have, and then I can log into that page and see if you're listed in my page insights.

PM me if you'd like to give it a go

LINKYPIE2009 · 27 September 2013 at 4:34PM

I think - but I could be wrong, that you need to set to Public or the company can't see that you've liked it.

I'm sure single who knows more will be along soon!

Barnabysue · 27 September 2013 at 4:36PM

If it's not Public the Company can't see your 'shares', whether the same applies to just liking the page is another thing, not sure about that.

mymble · 27 September 2013 at 4:50PM

Thanks for the replies :-)
emmaglet, I tried your suggestion with a friend's page and alas I do not show up :-( I'm still not sure if this means I'm not eligible for all these competitions but I know that it's not worth spamming my friends over. I wish I could set up a separate FB account for comping, grr!

starrybee · 27 September 2013 at 4:53PM

Well, I've just logged in to my company's Facebook page and it doesn't seem possible for us to view a list of everyone who likes us from our account (this doesn't seem very logical though, so maybe I'm being dim).

But as far as I can tell the only way for me to view if someone likes us is to go to their likes and look for us (this is a complete faff as you can't search so I'd have to actually look through them - which would take ages!).

So if your likes are private then I think the answer is no, they won't be able to tell if you like them or not - but I'm not sure how many would bother to check?!

mymble · 27 September 2013 at 5:03PM

Thank you for checking. I too wonder if they would bother to check, it sounds like a hassle! And I suppose any smart company would know that some of their likers have kept their page private.

Zanzib · 27 September 2013 at 5:21PM

As there are so many pages I've liked I untick them from showing in my news feed but put them in my interests list.

Wonder if that has an effect... I better check the settings on those.

Barnabysue · 27 September 2013 at 5:41PM

Surely the idea of running promotions is to advertise their page and products and if people are keeping their 'likes' private they're not following the rules.

Personally I would think they do check. I won a Facebook prize a couple of weeks ago and they sent me some text by email when I contacted them, and I had to put that as my status so that they could see that I was the correct claimant.