Know-How Exchange : Social Media

I am the only admin of a group on Facebook; the group is a craigslist/trade-it/gumtree/eBay/For Sale type of group where members can buy/sell items locally. It is also the most popular Facebook group in my town.

Due to the nature of my group I only add people who are local to my town; this attracts many local businesses who want to advertise. At the moment I only allow businesses to advertise who have paid a fee of £6 a month through my website or bank transfer and I also sell advertising space at the top of my group (cover photo of group and pinned post) to a local house removal business at £120 a month.

I am grateful that I am making the money I am currently through the advertisers but I am aware that Facebook doesn't allow this type of advertising and it goes against its community guidelines and rules. This is why I want to change to a method of monetization that Facebook allows in fear that one day I will end up in a lawsuit and get in deep trouble.

Alternative way I could monetize: Raffle/Contest

Running a raffle/contest on my group, I see other groups successfully making money this way, for example a raffle today; I've uploaded a picture of her raffle to imgur -> https://imgur.com/T00DfSX Her raffle is a £2 a ticket entry, offering a prize of £50 and then selling 30 tickets. This woman made £10 from them easily in 1 day and she only has 2,000 members on her group. She collected money via PayPal, bank transfer and cash in hand. Another option is to offer a prize instead of money. Ask a local business if they would donate something as the prize for the raffle, in return they would get advertising from sponsoring the raffle and we could both split the profits. An example could be a local restaurant offering a meal for 2 coupon or a bigger prize like a trip to Alton towers or a holiday if I managed to partner with someone big.

I've researched the legality of this for about an hour before I came here and it seems that Facebook allows it as long as you follow their rules. Saying that though I did read something about you having to make a Facebook app to run raffles like this and state in the raffle that Facebook has no responsibility and all the rest of it. If this is true I don't mind because I've made a Facebook webapp before and would rather stay within Facebook's rules. Either way I will be researching it thoroughly before proceeding.

If you know of someone who can help me out or an advertiser who I should get in contact with please let me know, I’m open to anything so long as it makes money and is legal on Facebook. Thanks for your input I’m eagerly waiting your responses.