Found this old link “13 reasons your Facebook account will be deleted” by accident, after stumbling across a post by social marketing trainer Mari Smith, who is finding Facebook is rather unsurprisingly mistaking (?) marketers for spammers and kicking them out even faster than they do with activists.
Anyway, Thor Mullen has identified the 13 top reasons why Facebook’s customer service robots would be alerted to your (entirely genuine) networking activities on the service, and either serve you a warning or a faceban. Pretty much what you’d expect in terms of ToS violations and power user traffic peaks, but worth reading before you set foot in a third party social network to spread an activist message.
Also worth it for this gem comment, which chimes with Derek Blackadder’s banning experiences – getting a ‘permanent and irreversible’ ban, which was pretty swiftly reversed:
“I was blocked for a little while because I was ‘misusing certain features of the site’ Naturally I closely examined their conditions of use etc for some insight as to what I must have done wrong. I couldn’t for the life of me find anything. Upon request for clarification I was told that they were not at liberty to divulge which features or of course any thresholds of use. Then they warned me not to do it again or I would be banned permanently without recourse to reinstatement.”
UPDATE 29/9/9: Just referred someone to this page and found the page I was linking to for Thor’s list has been deleted. So here (hoping Thor doesn’t mind) is the rest of the list from his very useful post, which I found from an old Facebook message:
- You didn’t use your real name
Don’t try to use a nickname (or initials)in lieu of the name on your birth certificate, because Facebook will find you and spit you out.- You joined too many groups
Remember that the maximum limit is 200 groups per user. More than that just looks desperate, don’t you think?- You posted too many messages on a wall or in a group
Even Guy Kawasaki had his account disabled–in his case for “excessive evangelism.”- You posted in too many groups, too many user’s walls
You may be axed for being too verbose in too many places. That’s what spammers do, silly. On Facebook it is better–or at least safer–to be seen than heard.- You friended too many people
Not so long ago this was a prime cause of disabled accounts, but Facebook has instituted a maximum of 5000 friends that should protect you from yourself.- Your school/organization affiliation is doubtful
The overlords are sometimes not very trusting, and they may accuse you of not graduating from Harvard (or Plum Senior High School). The impertinence! Better have your diploma ready.- You’re poking too many people
We’ve heard this from multiple sources, and it’s easy enough to avoid. Save the pokes for people you *really* like, as mum always said. But beware the odd FB app that pokes on your behalf.- For advertising your app on wall posts
The line between spam and self-promotion is a thin one, but let it be known that pimping your shiny new Facebook app is definitely considered SPAM.- Using duplicate text in multiple messages
Some people paste a generic welcome message into friend requests to save time. DON’T DO THIS! It makes you look like a spammer. (Ironically, pro spammers are probably randomizing their messages to avoid this trap)- You are a cow, dog, or library
Being a real person is not enough, you must be a homo sapien. Accounts have been deleted for cows, dogs and libraries.- You are under eighteen years old
According to one report a user’s account was suspended when they suspected her of being under 18. She was required to enter a work email address to prove her maturity, at which point her account was reinstated. [note: other users have pointed out that being under 18 is fine if you’re part of a High School group, though underage home schoolers have been told to bugger off]- You wrote offensive content
Reports of “sudden death” on accounts have been reported by users who were told they had posted offensive content, but were not provided details of the offense.- You scraped information off Facebook
They have a zero tolerance policy for page scraping (i.e. pulling content off their web pages via a script). Unfortunately, they don’t have a reliable way of proving it’s you who’s doing the scraping (IP matching is probably as good as they can get), so you may find this a difficult charge to defend yourself against.