Do You Know Someone Banned by Facebook – Be Very Careful What You Post to Your Profile

 Be Very Careful What You Post to Your Profile – No Advertising Messages?

I got this email today from one of my clients, Kathleen Gage

 I really did get banned from Facebook and haven’t the faintest idea why.

I tried to log on to my account on Sunday evening and found out I am out of the Facebook loop.

I have taken the necessary steps to reactivate my account. Hopefully this will be done soon and I will maintain all the friends and groups without any problem.

Kathleen is a very successful author, consultant and speaker who has been visible on Facebook for many years. She has many friends and several  groups. We are still trying to figure out what has happened. After looking over the Facebook terms of service in detail we think that too many automatic messages from Twitter and Ping.fm may be the cause the problem but we are not sure yet.

From Facebook terms of service:

Facebook does not allow users to register with fake names, to impersonate any person or entity, or to falsely state or otherwise misrepresent themselves or their affiliations. 

We do not allow users to send unsolicited or harassing messages to people they don’t know, and we  remove posts that advertise a product, service, website, or opportunity. 

This part is a little confusing does it mean they don’t allow any marketing messages to anyone or they don’t allow marketing messages to people you don’t know? Since you should not send messages to people you don’t know the part about advertising messages makes no sense. After Kathleen’s email she has received emails from many people and it is amazing the numbers who have had the same problem.

Below is a copy of an email sent to Erin Blanski (another visible person on Facebook) after she was banned and her profile was taken down. She was later reinstated but it created quite a hassle.

Notice they recommended that she send any marketing messages to her Facebook Fan Page. This just reinforces the need to get your friends over to your fan page. I hope they will make those pages more visible soon. For now I recommend you invite your friends over to you fan page several times a week. Don’t forget to post to them daily.

From Facebook

After checking out your account, I have decided to reactivate your profile. I apologize for the previous response you received. Facebook generally discourages users from promoting their business through user profiles, so at first glance, your account looked like a fake account being used to advertise. However, further review of your account showed that you are not sending unsolicited messages to users advertising your services. In order to keep your account from getting disabled again in the future, please make sure that you continue to only send information about your business to users who have contacted you first.

Another alternative you may want to use to spread the word about your business is Facebook Pages. A musical artist, business, or brand can create Facebook Pages to share information, interact with their fans, and create a highly engaging presence plugged into Facebook’s social graph. These Pages are distinct presences, separate from users’ profiles, and optimized for these presences’ needs to communicate, distribute information/content, engage their fans, and capture new audiences virally through their fans’ recommendations to their friends. Facebook Pages are designed to be a media rich, valuable presence solution for any artist, business, or brand that can be integrated seamlessly into the user experience with socially-relevant applications.

To create a Page, please visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php  

 The bottom line is this. Facebook is very fickled and no one seems to know exactly what the rules are. It seems like the Facebook Fan Pages are the answer but there is no easy way to transfer your friends from your Profile page over.

To be on the safe side here are my recommendations: 

• No automatic messages to Facebook from Twitter, FriendFeed or Ping.fm etc.  
•  Get a Facebook Fan Page for your business and invite all your friends to come over and become a fan.    
• Begin adding content to your Fan Page because it is actually indexed by Google