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.

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 profile.

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.

Of course, I was a member of probably about 50 groups and got quite a few e-mails from them each day.  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.

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.

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

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.

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 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 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.