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.  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.

Your goal is to be the ‘go-to’ source they trust and look for whenever they want info about your market.

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.

To give you fair warning when I first started using the site in the summer of 2007 I was unaware of the Facebook ettiquette and had run afoul of a couple of their rules and gotten 2 account warnings.

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 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.

In talking with my contact he said he talked with a few of his friends and had seen about eight groups deleted because the group admin was consistently making promotional e-mail communications to those groups.

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.

This week I’ve contacted Facebook via e-mail twice and I’ve gotten no replies as to why my account was shut down nor gotten it rightfully reinstated.

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 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.

Northern Light Of Information

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