If you’ve been keeping up with my blog or the social media space for any amount of time you know that Facebook is getting lots of buzz and achieving exceptional growth.  Their buzz has outdistanced both MySpace and a LinkedIn.

Facebook Connect is also generating buzz right now.

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.

You may have seen my Alexander Alaric account and even may have been my friend because I had over 3000 friends in my account which were almost exclusively business contacts not personal friends I had met in the off-line world.

It was a networking tool for me to connect with people who are in the markets I’m in.

I even built up from scratch 4 groups with 500 plus members each.

2 of those groups, TaggZilla Internet Marketers and Google Social Marketing, had over 1200 members each. I’m told the groups are still there even though I can’t access them (I’ll get to that in a minute).

So I was bopping along enjoying my Facebook experience when…disaster struck.

Monday, January 12, 2009 will always be my own personal FB D-Day.

I was checking my emails and had received some critical communications from friends on some of my notes and my friends notes. FB notes are very useful and viral. So I went to FB to participate in the conversation.

And that’s when the unthinkable happened…

It gave me the message and I paraphrase “Your account has been disabled by an administrator”.

“No way, FB’s version of Apple’s ‘black screen of death’. This is insane. How could this be?”  I asked myself

The last time I’d logged into my account was early Thursday. It was now Monday so there was no activity (suspicious or otherwise) to warrant this unprovoked attack and shutdown of my account.

To give you some background, I first signed up and started using FB in July of 2007. Being an FB newbie I ran afoul of a couple of their stringent friend add and site acceptable use filters.

My account was warned and turned off once. So I had to contact the admins and ask what I did wrong and request they turn my account back on.

I didn’t know any better and they turned it back on.

Basically, I had been adding friends in groups I was part of too rapidly with the same canned message using Roboform.

They gave me the stern message not to add too many friends too fast or the account would be permanently disabled.

So I’ve been very good since then and had no further problems.  I haven’t had even 1 single day where I’ve requested over 10 friends.

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.

So I was terribly vexed as to why my account got shut down.

And I started talking to my expert FB friends to see if I could get to the bottom of it and get ideas for a potential remedy to turn my account back on.

What I discovered after talking to my friends shocked me…

It seems Facebook is now cracking down on promotional emails to groups. This is quite odd because building a group within FB is basically the same as building an email list on Aweber which I use or any other service.

I’d been doing this without a problem sending out about 1 email per week to my 4 groups.

I guess now with Microsoft’s heavy investment FB is forcing any type of sales or promotional messages to go out through their pay per click advertising system or their social ads.

In talking with one of my contacts he said he’d seen about 8 groups deleted because the group admin was consistently sending promotional e-mail communications to those groups.

No word on whether their accounts were wrongfully terminated. Maybe I was singled out and selectively prosecuted with extreme prejudice.

The worst part is FB won’t tell me. They’ve given me zero info.

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.

A friend of mine was launching a very useful and proven instructional course on Google’s potential game changing software Google Friend Connect and I wanted to help him out.

And Google Social Marketing Group was built to talk about and educate the members on getting maximum results from this cool and free software.

Unfortunately, I was unaware of FB’s apparent new policy disallowing promotions to groups and so I must have gotten snared by their filters and my account shutdown.

Last week I sent Facebook admins 2 emails and have gotten only radio silence in return. I guess my emails fell into a black hole or weren’t important enough to respond to.

That’s the most upsetting part. All the thousands of hours I put into the site and they can’t even have the common courtesy to tell me why my account was abruptly and wrongfully shutdown. And get it rightfully reinstated.

This is extremely unfair to me as well as the thousands of connections I’ve made and the people who count on me for the information I provide them.

If it was a published policy and blatant misuse of the site at least I could understand that. I did nothing of the sort because I wasn’t even on the site during the time my account was shutdown.

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’re able to reach out to influencers and the big boys in your market where if you contacted them by any other means you’d be pissing in the dark.

Just 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.

Use it for making business connections and don’t spend time playing with your profile or “throwing sheep at others” or “sending vampire bites”.

Happy Facebooking and beware.

Oh, and you can really help me out by being part of the “Reinstate Alexander Alaric” FB campaign. Send an email to the admins at disabled @ facebook.com (obviously without spaces) asking them to please reinstate my account.

It’s the only thing I know to do at this point. It will only take a few seconds of your time and only a grassroots effort is likely to get any movement from them. Thanks for your help.

Originally posted 2009-01-20 21:10:13. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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