Facebook Page Banned, Facebook is Removing Fan Pages as Part of Their Annual Purge
Hearing the words Facebook fanpage banned, not words that you ever want to read or hear. Power certainly corrupts. On the other hand a wise man will always tell any business or entrepreneur never to place all of ones shiny eggs in a single basket.
That is not the always advice that is heeded for various reasons especially when there is only one egg. When there is only a single egg it can be risky business trying not to upset the golden goose. This October 2016, Facebook has been going on a fan page banning spree. Harshly deactivating fan pages that it no longer likes, seemingly for any or no reason at all.
The corporate giant that is Facebook is most certainly run by kids with a few older statesmen steering the ship. For all it’s power and reach, for all the technical wizardry and vast resources these kind of corporate entities actually really lack the human touch. Instead high levels of automation, robotic canned emails and other timesaving algorithms try to plug the vast gaping vacuum that is customer service and common sense on Facebook.
Facebook is a social media and hungry ad giant whose revenues largely come from paid advertising via the Facebook Ads Platform. The social ecosystem also allows members to operate business pages and groups according to terms of service that are sometimes vague and open to wild interpretation.
Now page owners are complaining of a swathe of inexplicable Facebook page bans and unsympathetic and heavy handed corporate bullies.
Anyone who has ever operated Adsense or Adwords on Google will know what I mean. Google has got a lot better at appearing more human and approachable in the last year. They are more accessible and the reliance on automated email systems to decide your fate has been dialed back a notch. Google haven’t done this to appear as a good guy. Rather they had to make some changes in order to cut down on lawsuits and interference by governments that were eating into the revenue stream.
You Do Not Own Your Facebook Page – They Do
Facebook has yet to really eat the kind of humble pie that can only be served up by others with equal power, huge reach and authority. Until then they have the means to unleash their corporate whims on all and sundry and if you don’t like it then there is limited scope for appeal and redress. Every once in a while Facebook goes on a housekeeping and cleaning exercise. They remove fan pages, business pages and groups for seemingly any or no reason at all while citing reasons using vague claims of violation of their terms of service.
Facebook Fanpage Banned
Are we talking about hate pages here, adult or extremist material, nope not at all. More often these are real fan pages about cats, dogs, muscle cars, amazing places and other pages that have amassed loyal fanbases over many years. Millions of fans in some cases that generate a serious income and lucrative revenue stream for the page owner.
“I never started a mailing list for my website, because I didn’t want to “spam” my fans. I am paying the price for that dearly now. I have been crying daily for two weeks. I am financially, professionally and emotionally ruined.”
It’s a crying shame that Zuckerberg can have a fan page for his pet dog but THOUSANDS upon thousands of fan pages were unpublished in October 2016 just within the last few days with little or no warning and hardly any serious responses to frantic appeals by page owners.”
For the few page owners that did get an email reply with their answer to why their pages were unpublished, the response was ridiculously vague and made little sense to publishers. This kind of corporate, laid back approach is badly hurting not only the page owners but the millions of page fans that visited those humor and fun, friendly fan pages each and EVERY DAY to get their minds off whatever pain and issues they were in that day or simply to laugh and express themselves when they had only wanted to cry tears.
Like I said these are not hate pages or extremist nonsense pages. These are fan pages for normal, everyday mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, businesses and friends to come together to help each other through the struggles of raising a family and living a life.
Facebook Pages Were the Life Blood of Our Business
They are Facebook fan pages for pet owners and hobbyists. Facebook took our hard work, passion and our hearts that we put into building those pages and the loyal friendships that we built with those fans and just killed it all off in one fell swoop. In doing so leaving no channels open for recourse, leaving page owners without a way for us to respond and reach out to a real human person, just robotic template emails.
Facebook page owners made those pages as a way of coping with things going on is our lives and to distract us from it all, even if only for a little bit and for no reason at all. Those at Facebook just took that away from us.
Why would Facebook use a automated system that is so cold and that unforgiving that it can just take away everything someone worked for? The answer is because they can and it is efficient, is it a good thing? No of course it isn’t.
Will Zuckerberg read this page and haul in his minions to explain, nope I doubt it. Change in behaviour at these corporate giants requires a receiving a huge dent in the wallet and irritating government or regulatory interference before they engage. Will that happen here, nope!
Is There any Kind of Corporate Responsibly Here?
With terms and conditions that you accept, your Facebook page can go up in smoke at any time. If the page is generating a lot of revenue then you are skating on thin ice. In my opinion Facebook should seriously improve the way it engages with fan page owners. There is merit in suggestions that they are not consistent in the way they have unpublished pages. Especially when you study high profile celebrity pages and those belonging to big advertisers such as Buzzfeed for instance.
Google came in for the same kind criticism many times over when they clamped down on PPC arbitrage a few years ago. So many companies put out of business there. While they blatantly allowed high spending spam sites ( and Google partners ) like Ask.com to continue exactly the same business model that they were forbidding other firms to engage in. Double standards, unleveled playing fields and stacked odds. These do nothing for the long term reputation of a firm no matter how big it may have become.
Facebook owes much of its early growth to exactly the kind of people it is now squeezing and hurting. Once the rot sets in, it can be hard to stop the spread. Even the Facebook ad ecosystem is not immune. As prices rise there and more regulation makes advertising harder. A large swathe of entrepreneurs will look to the next big thing.
Learn From History, Empires Always Fall
History teaches us that empires never last forever, Facebook should learn that lesson early; lest they start to experience backlash after backlash and more and more revenue lost to lawsuits and other advertising channels.
Mitigating Your Risk
If you are a Facebook fan page owner who has been banned and dumped on from a  great height then what can you do? If you are a fan page owner scared about finding yourself in the same situation what can you do to fix it? Risk mitigation is the answer. If you have a million fans ( nice round figure ) then ask your self can you still reach them with no fan page?
Mitigate the risk of Facebook corporate bullies by collecting fan emails and build a segmented list. Consider also linking your page to a blog, find a way off Facebook for fans to flock to if your page goes down. Then you can rebuild it quickly from these external sources. Protect the revenue stream as much as possible and always, always remember that it’s NOT your page. So build something that is and do it fast.
