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.
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.
Whether this belief and reputation is true or not is highly debatable because I’ve been a Facebook user for about 19 months now and have seen the level of spam slowly creep up.
I had over 3000 friends in my Facebook account.
I tell you this not to brag but simply to point out I was a heavy user of Facebook. And admittedly most of these were business contacts not personal friends I had met in the off-line world.
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.
So I was bopping along enjoying my Facebook experience 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.
Since I began using the site in July of 2007 I’d gotten caught in their “account warning” filters twice. My account had been disabled due to this.
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.
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.
My contact also said a few groups he’s a part of have been shutdown and he regularly got promotion emails from them.
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.
I have emailed the admins twice but to no avail. They won’t even give me a reason why or rightfully turn my account back on.
This is extremely unfair to me and all the thousands of man-hours I’ve put into building my profile as well as the thousands of connections I’ve made and the people who count on me for the information I provide them.
But it’s like falling into a black hole where there’s no person you can contact to get your account back.
So my advice to you is to only add 20 to 30 friends per day, never send out e-mails to more than one person because you should be using groups and events, and don’t send out any promotional e-mails to your groups because apparently Facebook is now disallowing that.
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.
