We’ve all either had it happen to us or know someone who’s had it happen to them: you begin posting into your party, or inviting guests to your group, or messaging friends about an opportunity and all the sudden you find yourself in ‘Facebook Jail’. You’re suddenly unable to interact with your invited guests, invite anyone else, or use messenger at all, in the more extreme cases you’re kicked off FB entirely! This can be devastating to both your business and peace of mind. At PostMyParty it’s our mission to not only help you post your parties but to educate you and protect you from some of these FB pitfalls that can lead to ‘Jail’.
Be sure to read and understand FB’s Community Standards. A lot of blocks happen simply because people don’t realize that FB has a clear set of rules and unknowingly violate them.
o FB requires that you only have one FB Profile and that profile should use your given name. If you want to use a separate place for business FB offers Business Pages where you can use your business name and promote your business however you choose.
o Be sure not to use any content you don’t have express permission to use.
o Don’t send too many messages to people who aren’t your friends or message people only to promote a product or opportunity
o Don’t friend too many people too fast or invite too many people to a group or event without getting responses
o Don’t post too quickly (we recommend leaving 5 minutes between any posts or comments) - FB doesn’t provide information on their exact limits but all of these are reasons they have given for ‘misusing a feature’ and putting you on the block list.
Try the 80/20 rule - keep your posts 80% fun, casual, personal, inspirational, educational posts and only 20% sales and promotional. Then when you do post a promotional or sales post do it from your business page and you can use the share button to send it to your profile as well – this will share the information and grow awareness of your page and business without breaking any rules (just choose quality over quantity when you do this and don’t feel like you need to share EVERY post to your profile).
Personal profiles are for non-commercial use only – which means any promotions, contests, sales, and calls to action need to take place on your business page.
o Remember that asking your guests to share or tag friends to win a prize can be against their terms as well: “Promotions may be administered on Pages, groups, events or within apps on Facebook. Personal timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions (e.g. "share on your timeline to enter" or "share on your friend's timeline to get additional entries" and "tag your friends in this post to enter" are not permitted).”
Use original content whenever you can - original text, original videos, original captions, original images, original link titles/descriptions. Differentiate your posts from anyone else’s, not only will doing so prevent it from looking like spam to FB but it will also create more meaningful engagement.
Don’t constantly post your shopping link everywhere. This can look like spam – when running a party post it at the beginning and end of your party and pin the post with it in to the top of your group so they’ll easily find it without having to add it to every post.
We know this can seem daunting but remember that we, at PostMyParty, have your back! We offer features like Replacement Tokens to help you easily edit your template for your individual parties and we warn you if you are scheduling the same exact post into more than one place at the same time to prevent your parties looking like spam. We don’t allow more than one post within the same minute and automatically default posts to every 5 minutes to prevent you from ‘posting too fast’. We also offer party training sessions in our FB group every Wednesday at noon (Central). We have made it our business and goal for you to succeed and thrive in your business!