How to Get Your Direct Sales Business Banned on Facebook

Using Your Personal Profile for Marketing – Sadly, many reps are being instructed by their uplines to promote with abandon on their personal profiles. Day after day your Friends are seeing nothing but how wonderful your products are and you suddenly hit the jackpot when they Friended you for kid pics and your sense of humor. And they are irked. They may not say anything to you personally, but they may hide your updates or mark your links as spam which Facebook tracks.

First things first, profiles are not for advertising. Per Facebook,

Personal timelines are for individual, non-commercial use.

If you are looking to advertise your business, create a Page. Promoting via your personal profile may not only be an annoyance, it may be seen as spam. Facebook combats spam to the ninth degree. They are also very open about what they define as spam,

On Facebook, the most common unacceptable behavior involves some abuse of our communication tools. This can be as innocent as annoying others with too many messages or friend requests or as serious as deliberately trying to spam others for commercial gain.

Just Plain Spamming – If you are messaging and sending your consultant URL to people that have not asked for it or given you explicit permission to do so, it is spam. The same goes for dropping your link on every Page you come across. As a Page owner and a person that speaks with other Page owners on a daily basis, nothing is more annoying than people dropping by for no other reason than to drop an unsolicited link on your Wall. Guess what happens to those posts? They are marked as spam. It is one thing if a Page owner has opened their Wall to a Fan Page Friday or Promote Your Business thread, it is another if you believe it is your *right* to drop your link everywhere you see fit. That is spam.

Messaging People You Don’t Know – There are frequent reports of people “harvesting” names from Facebook Pages and messaging their opportunity or products to all of these poor people they don’t know. Spam. You do not have these people’s permission to message them. You don’t even know them. They in turn hit the button inching your company closer to Facebook extinction. If someone has give you permission to speak with them about your company, take it to email or phone.

Friending People You Don’t Know – If you are friending strangers for no other reason than to promote your business, you will be blocked. Facebook monitors this activity and encourages users to report those trying to Friend them that they do not know. Red flag.