The lowdown on Facebook Jail
Okay so what exactly is Facebook Jail?
If you are caught operating your Facebook account outside of Facebook’s guidelines, you’ll eitherbe blocked or banned (by Facebook) from posting on the sit or accessing your account, due to violations or spammy behaviour. This could also ultimately lead to your Facebook account being deleted entirely.
Now, how do you avoid being blocked by Facebook?
1. Create Original Content
You all know this. And you’ve all seen it at least once before, those YouTube video’s that get taken down because they’ve used x amount of minutes of music from an artist and didn’t specify that it wasn’t theirs. It’s simple. Credit the owner, people!Whether you’ve taken the photo from Google images, or gone to a website that supplies free stock images like Pixabay or Unsplash, it’s still always best to credit the original owner of the image as opposed to being written off due to copyright issues. Anyway, your brand will look ten times better with your own imagery and content, so why not put in the time and effort, and get creative!
2. SPAM –
And we mean the annoying junk messages you get in your inbox, not the canned meat.
You remember back in uni/college, that one friend who was a club promoter – who spammed you every single weekend about the same event that was happening the week before.
And you remember how annoying that was, pretending like it was okay when really you just wanted to block them from everinviting you to ‘Perfect Fridays’ or whatever other verbs the clubs used to get people in the doors.
Now this is how Facebook feels when you send friend requests to multiple people you have no connection with. Excessively promoting your business on other Facebook Business Pages could also land you in Facebook jail. This also goes with using private messages to promote your business. This could possibly lead to being reported by these recipients of unwanted notifications. There are so many other ways to promote your business without getting too ‘spammy’, and like number 1 suggests, get creative with it and don’t post the same thing over and over again, and additional tip: Make sure you leave a good amount of time when you post, maybe two to three times a week, so that Facebook doesn’t confuse you as a SPAM-bot! Don’t be that guy…
3. Tag, you’re it!
As much as we loved that childhood game of chasing each other around, you wouldn’t want to be chased by Facebook for adding people to groups without their consent and over-posting on Facebook pages with non-personal profiles like classifieds/garage sales.
This also goes with tagging your friends in posts they have no relation to. People hate to be tagged in photos they feel they don’t look good in, but what they’d dislike even more is if you tagged them in a photo they weren’t even in! Unless, it’s something super personal and you’re not trying to sell the person something – they’re not interested! Mention or tag them in the comments instead. It’s easier for them to turn off notifications for the post, rather than untagging themselves and making you look like an idiot.
4. Read, don’t just slide that mouse scroll all the way down.
Now this is as simple as it gets. Just read the goddamn Terms & Conditions! Yes, we’ve all done it. Scrolled to the bottom of the fine print and just clicked ‘Accept’. By doing this, you’re telling Facebook you understand every.single.thing about posting on the platform and that you’ve read their Terms of Service. We all know you haven’t.
And Facebook will find out and throw you in that jail of theirs if you violate any of their rules. Remember, you only get ONE personal account. Don’t go off and try to make a Business Page with your name – They will hunt you down. Avoid being locked out of your own personal account by creating pages for business purposes instead!
It’s not difficult to exercise your freedom with Facebook, and social media is always evolving as fast as the grass is growing. Now live free, little birdies!