Website Marketing Skills For Small Businesses

All around the world, thousands, no tens of thousands of facebook users are being banned and suspended on a weekly basis. If you hear a long howl of terrible loneliness and you know there are no wolves in your area, look for a desperate facebook soul who has just had their account either suspended or banned.

Some might say – so what? Big deal, you got banned or suspended. But if you are the one in the soup and your boss is wondering what happened to the 300 friends you were going to invite to his party, or your loved one is wondering if you are hiding from him/her then the deal gets a little more serious.

So, let me see if I got this right – 580 cherished friends of your mother-in-law didn’t get their invite and you just got suspended from facebook while in this, the most tedious of chores. Better come straight with your mother-in-law right away, because facebook does not lift suspensions in any “reasonable” time-frame. And as for outright bans, if you were given one of those unjustly, you can try their dispute resolution email, however for all intents and purposes you are better off kissing that account goodbye.

And let us not forget that commercial class of people feeling deep business angst over having lost their list of 3-4000 prospects. Sometimes these are the mom and pop type companies who have decided to use facebook for marketing and sometimes these are sizable mid-sized corporations getting overly aggressive with their grassroots marketing or surveying. In any case, the loss of the profile also means no contact with the prospective customer base.

Because of how low key that warning message is, a busy user can click right on through that most important of stop signs. And in that article, I covered how easy this was to do too.

Ignorance of the Law is no excuse and in the case of Facebook, a faceless engine in the background deems certain activity looks like spam according to their filters and suddenly you are out of there. But here is some detail on activities that you should NOT do, so as to stay out of trouble with Facebook.

Blatant Nudity – for you exhibitionists this is a no no Writing to too many people who are not your friends ( yet ) Writing too much to people who have invited you to be their friend but whom you have not yet accepted. Writing on too many walls in a short period of time – looks like spam

Using images without permission – you are asked about this. Using facebook’s email facility as if it were IM or MSN or Yahoo chat. Odd that on a social network you can get banned for that, but there you go. Facebook has a chat facility and they would rather you use that rather than abuse the email in that way. Promotion of racism, hate mail or any of the regular sort of utterances that would have gotten you in trouble outside of facebook too. People engaging in this thing shouldn’t be surprised if their accounts are permanently suspended.

We see two forms of general problems that people fall prey to just before getting banned or suspended. One of them, which includes posting obvious un-artistic nude pictures and hacking etc., is a pretty blatant activity on the part of the user and the reasons for getting banned are obvious enough.

The other “I got banned, woe be me look” is more frequently caused by the user inadvertently triggering a time constraint applied to **spammers**.

a time based limit that has been exceeded such as inviting two hundred strangers to be your friend in a week which is allowed, but not if done in 30 minutes.

Read the Terms of Conditions and if you get suspended or banned there is an email where you can try to plead your case. I suspect they get thousands of pleading emails daily, so don’t expect a quick answer. One to three weeks may be the norm for a response.