The Dreaded Facebook Screen of Death

You’ve probably heard a lot of things about Facebook being one of the best social networking sites out there.  It has run circles around both MySpace and LinkedIn (though LinkedIn is still the preferred social network for professionals.

However, it’s achieved these lofty heights because it is believed to be far less spammy and more real than the other social networking sites in the marketplace.

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.

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.

Being a member of many groups meant I got more emails which wasn’t bad because I’d opted-in to them.  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.

Your goal is to be the ‘go-to’ source they trust and look for whenever they want info about your market.

I was moving along networking and doing my thing when…disaster struck.

Unfortunately, a crazy thing happened to me on Monday, January 12, 2009.

In checking my e-mails I saw a couple of notices from some of my Facebook contacts which I needed to respond to.  So I clicked on the link in the e-mail to go to the appropriate page on Facebook and it gives me the login screen.  “Okay, I thought I’d indicated to keep me logged in but no big deal I’ll just go ahead and log in again” I said to myself.

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 was super pissed because I hadn’t been on the website at all for over 4 days and now all of a sudden my account was banned. What happened to cause this?

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.

After the account mishap I’d been very careful and not done any friend adds because by that point many people were friending me.

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.

Facebook is now disallowing promotion to groups which was the way they wanted you to mass communicate…up until an apparent internal company policy shift.  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.

Since this policy is new and I had no idea I sent out my normal communications and got slapped.

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.

Facebook is still a great and high growth platform with over 140 million users now.  You just have to be very careful when you’re using it so you can avoid the fate I suffered and the thousands of man-hours now down the tubes because of an unpublicized policy shift.

So happy Facebooking and beware.