How Facebook Shut Down My Account Without Warning

There’s been much buzz about Facebook lately and for good reason.  It has run circles around both MySpace and LinkedIn (though LinkedIn is still the preferred social network for professionals.

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.

I had over 3000 friends in my Facebook profile for launch.

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.

So the point is you must make sure your communications have highly valuable subject lines, with high levels mysterious and value provided so your group members will open them because it’s just like any other e-mail inbox in that you have to compete with many other messages for the attention of your group members.

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.

I was moving along networking and doing my thing 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.

So I’ve been very good since then and had no further problems.  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.

The fact my account got shut down without warning and for no reason had me greatly confused.

After contacting a few of my friends who are also heavy and highly expert site users I got down to what I believe may be the root reason why my account got disabled.

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.

Unfortunately, I was unaware of this new policy about how the social networking site is no longer allowing promotions to groups and so I got snared apparently by their filters and my account shutdown.

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.

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.