No, you may not hyperlink to Facebook
The Facebook Brand Permissions page, which I’ve just illegally linked to, exists to “provide guidelines on how to make correct references in text to Facebook when offering your own products or services.”
Such resources are always valuable in helping writers and developers properly reference a brand or collect media kit information. However, their second guideline is a head scratcher.
“Never hyperlink a textual reference to Facebook.”
Seriously? The point of the Web is to make it easy for people to traverse content and link off to pages and sites of interest. This in not only counter-intuitive but borders on insanity. Especially since the guidelines go on to describe how you can reference you Vanity URL with Facebook.
You are only allowed to refer to your Facebook Vanity URL so long as you “Never hyperlink a textual reference to Facebook.”
Does that mean that as a marketer, and member of Facebook, that I can never link off to my Facebook Page? Or that I can link to the page as long as it doesn’t say “Please visit the Client Name Facebook Page?”
The majority of the guidelines make sense from a brand perspective, but to encourage people to never hyperlink a textual reference to Facebook is something that will be difficult to police and makes little sense.
Facebook should be encouraged when we properly link to their site and continue to drive traffic to one of the largest Social Media venues in the world. Am I missing something here or is this just ridiculous?
5 Comments
buzzup.com
January 19, 2010Dennis Jenders » No, you may not hyperlink to Facebook…
“Never hyperlink a textual reference to Facebook.” Seriously? The point of the Web is to make it easy for people to traverse content and link off to pages and sites of interest. This in not only counter-intuitive but borders on insanity. Especially sin…
nfrank
January 19, 2010What about hyperlinking an image? Seems like an easy way to get around it. Its totally about brand identity. Also if you think that rule is a lot, just take a look at the facebook apis usage policy. fun fun.
Dennis Jenders
January 20, 2010Nate -
Hope you are doing well my man!
Yea, linking an image would be the simple solution. However I just don’t see that working with inline text very well. I’ve been doing a lot with their APIs for Apps and what not. They are very restrictive there. And I hate the whole “no contests unless we approve it” policy. But I suppose they have their reasons.
Brian Wyrick
March 9, 2010I saw this today as well and thought it strange.
Dennis Jenders
March 9, 2010Brian -
It’s pretty a pretty odd request by Facebook. I almost liken it to the request by Adobe to stop using “Photoshop” as a verb.
Dennis