Good evening everyone. Well I have a dilemma that I have to deal with over at Facebook. Well over on Facebook you have the option of not hiding your birthday. Well I have quite a few Facebook friends, 3000+ and I had quite a few people wish me happy birthday. I was given virtual flowers, chocolate, gifts, and even had some people make videos. It was quite overwhelming. This morning I wrote a note thanking around 200 people and I still had some to go. This evening I decided to respond to the messages I received. I wrote up a standardized thank you and commenced answering what I would figure 50 messages. A few minutes into doing that I got a warning message that I was doing something against their terms and to stop. OK. I stopped. Well I also had over 25 friend requests so as I usually do, I accept and put a welcome message on their page. I was into about 10 of them when I got a message saying I was suspended. No account, a lot of hard work over the last year, and I hear Facebook is hard to deal with.
I guess I could panic and be mad, but their system has no way of knowing whether something is legitimate or spam. I kind of wish they had that policy instituted on Twitter. I grumbled a bit and then crafted a letter simply explaining what I was doing. I’ve heard that they will re-instate after a while but it could range between a few days to a few weeks. That’s all I really can do. Now I’ll have more time to spend on this blog. This is a lesson we all can learn from. When you rely on other internet sites to carry your message you need to be prepared in case they simply suspend you or drop off the earth, whether for a valid reason or not. You need to try and get in a position where you host all your own content or as much as possible yourself. You also have to be looking for the next social medium that will replace some of the old and be able to easily adapt.
So as Yogi Berra once said “I made a wrong mistake.”
Pingback/Trackback
Twitted by JoeEmmet
Chris,
Your warning comes on the heals of the experience our friend Jonathan Budd had weeks ago with YouTube.
We, the entrepreneurs, the risk takers, the leaders NEED to control our content. We also need to use every distribution channel that works for our market(s).
So, protect yourself and learn what each channel allows and doesn’t allow.
One thought Chris, next time use Twitter to alert your friends to a thank you message left on your blog (of course this assumes your FaceBook friends are following you on Twitter); might have prevented a bit of a melt down.
Yours in excellence and mastery,
Joe
PS Glad to have provided the inspiration for this entry, sorry you had to make the post!
Great news. My Facebook account was restored!
Note to self. Be very careful.
Chris sorry to hear you had to experience that.
It’s a common mistake. What you need to remember is Facebook has a ‘Feature Abuse’ policy. They state that if they think a user is abusing a feature they will send them a warning note, and then potentially shut their account down. What really is happening is Facebook has automated a system that automatically does this, which is the problem.
If you want to prevent this from happening again, you should remember not to perform any actions too many times at once, try to limit yourself and spread them across 10 to 15 minute intervals.
Hope all goes well.
- Adam Haider
http://adamhaider.com
http://twitter.com/adamhaider
Glad you were restored. I was put on hold for sending emails as well once, but it was only for one day. It’s amazing how reliant we have become on our social networking sites.
Welcome back!
Julie Spira
Thank you guys. I appreciate your responses. I wonder what the ratio of suspensions are comparing legit one vs. something I did. I will take care to spread out notifications and messages.