You’ve probably heard a lot of things about Facebook being one of the best social networking sites out there. It has lapped and gotten much more buzz than its competitors MySpace and LinkedIn.
The reason Facebook has achieved its status as the ‘go to social network’ is because of its perceived hipness and lack of spam.
I’d have to debate this less spam belief because from what I’ve seen after using it for 19 months now the spam has increased as time goes on. Guess it’s only natural the spammers go where the eyeballs are.
I had over 3000 friends in my Facebook profile for launch.
I tell you this not to brag but simply to point out I was a heavy user of Facebook. I used this as my business contact and networking account so I’d only met 6 of them in person…the rest were contacts I’d friended on the site
I used it mainly for networking with people who are interested in the kind of business and markets I am in.
I even built up 4 groups with 500 plus members each and two of those groups had over 1200 members each.
Of course, I was a member of probably about 50 groups and got quite a few e-mails from them each day. And lots of times I didn’t have the time to fully read through all of those e-mail communications from the groups I was a part of.
Basically, the in-site inbox has the same rules as any general email inbox. You have to get their attention so they’ll read your communication. You do this by providing value and building your positive reputation in their mind.
Once you get a reputation for consistently providing them tremendous value they’ll open up most if not all of your e-mail messages as long as you continue to provide them the high level of value they’ve come to expect from your communications.
I was moving along networking and doing my thing when…disaster struck.
Unfortunately, a crazy thing happened to me on Monday, January 12, 2009.
I’d gotten a couple email notifications that I needed to respond to from friends. So I went to the site and it gave me the login screen.
And that’s when the unthinkable happened…
It gave me the message and I paraphrase “your account has been disabled by an administrator”.
“How could this be?” I asked myself
I hadn’t even log in to Facebook since Thursday of the previous week and this was Monday so how did my account get shut down over the weekend. There was no activity at all much less suspicious activity to warrant them shutting me down.
To give you fair warning when I first started using the site in the summer of 2007 I was unaware of the Facebook ettiquette and had run afoul of a couple of their rules and gotten 2 account warnings.
Basically, I had been adding friends in groups I was part of too rapidly with the same canned message using Roboform. And so the Facebook administrators re-enabled my account after telling me not to do the suspicious activity anymore.
So I’ve been very good since then and had no further problems. I operated within Facebook’s guidelines, built groups using invites, and instead of e-mailing everybody individually I would set up an event and invite them to the event just like Facebook wants you to do.
The fact my account got shut down without warning and for no reason had me greatly confused.
After talking to a few of my expert friends I had a theory as to why it happened.
It seems Facebook is now cracking down on promotion to groups even though that’s the way they’ve wanted you to be able to mass communicate in the past. Maybe all the heavy investment dollars they’ve taken are now forcing them to move forward more rapidly with monetizing the site than they planned. Either way it seems I got caught in the crossfire.
In talking with my contact he said he talked with a few of his friends and had seen about eight groups deleted because the group admin was consistently making promotional e-mail communications to those groups.
I had sent out a subtle e-mail communication with a link to an opt in page to all four of my groups on Thursday. I did this because I was helping a friend launch a new product about Google Friend Connect and I varied the words I used in each of those e-mails so as not to upset the Facebook gods.
Unfortunately, I was unaware of this new policy about how the social networking site is no longer allowing promotions to groups and so I got snared apparently by their filters and my account shutdown.
This week I’ve contacted Facebook via e-mail twice and I’ve gotten no replies as to why my account was shut down nor gotten it rightfully reinstated.
It a terrible injustice because of all the time I’ve put in and the powerful connections I’ve built. To just rip it away without warning is bad business.
But it’s like falling into a black hole where there’s no person you can contact to get your account back.
So here’s what you should do…follow their rules as much as you can. Only add 20 or so friends a day and don’t send out anything promotional. Get people to contact you through other means to make an offer to them.
It’s still a great site, resource and place to meet people or valuable business contacts and more people are joining everyday…up to 140 million users now. Just beware of unannounced policy changes which can devastate all that beautiful work you’ve put in.
So happy Facebooking and beware.
