If you use Facebook to promote you or your business

NOTICE: This is NOT a bad mouth Facebook thread. If you feel the need to vent about them do it off forum as it will more than likely get this thread deleted and/or yourself timed out or banned from forum.
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I was reading through Facebook's policies and came across this
Help Center | Facebook

I recently had my FB account disabled, they wont tell me anything but honestly it isn't that big of a deal to me. I only used it for research and keeping up with family members that use it. The little under 1200 friends I had on the account I got mostly from organic methods, I actively followed maybe few hundred people but the rest organically befriended me or whatever it is called.

As I was curious about account disable possibilities, I investigated and found a lot of people in similar situations, many hating on FB and whoas me world comes to end doom and gloom... I read through all Facebook's policies on their site, which I didn't really do before and came across something that totally goes against what everyone I have ever seen or heard of that talks about Facebook as a marketer. Apparently most of, if not all of the stuff out there on marketing on facebook actually goes against the FB TOS, they have sub sections within sub sections but here --> Help Center | Facebook is what I am talking about.


Here are few things I got from this:


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You can only have ONE account on FB, period.

You are not allowed to promote any kind of business or professional organization including yourself for name branding purposes.

They have a business account you can get but it is NOT a regular user account, no friends lists or anything like a regular account has. It is mostly for managing paid advertisements you have running on their site.

You can use a business page, I am not sure if it is same as fan pages or seperate through the business account but there are restrictions about what you can and can't use the page for. I didn't get to much into reading about this, the way it sounded to me was either a paid thing or tied to business accounts but I didn't get too much into it so I don't know for sure.

Many of the products and things you read about selling and marketing on facebook point blank goes against their policies.

You can buy advertising on their site, which seems to be the only approved method for promoting yourself or business through FB.

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I did not do ANY of these things with my FB account though but they don't tell you why, I have had no response back from them at all and neither have others I know that had samething happen to them. But like I said it is not a big deal to me at all. The purpose here is to alert those that did not know, if you are using your facebook account for anything other than playing around nonprofessionally then for the most part it is against their TOS and if someone reports a post or activity and they look at your account, it will get terminated more than likely and you may get banned altogether.

I was chatting a bit with Lynn Terry in email about it, she never experienced anything like this but it made me think about possibilities, beyond a hater trying to get back at me for some imagined thing they think I did to them or a member of a clique I torqued off etc... Looking at other possibilities I discovered a lot of what IMers are teaching about FB just isn't cool with Facebook at all. I already figured out some of this on my own but I figured at least a few people here might not know.

I know A LOT of people and you do too, that use FB to do exactly what I am saying isn't kosher with FB. In fact I specifically followed people just because of the content they shared, BUT apparently none of that is ok with FB so it is a matter of time before all these people are shunned by FB.

What are your thoughts on marketing on Facebook and other social media sites? Does possibility of getting your account closed and you possibly banned for life for doing what others here and other places say is cool and is THE way to promote on FB?


Thanks,

- T