Getting blocked is the number one problem there is when it comes to hosting your parties online. For most of our customers, this never happens, but for some, it seems to be an ongoing problem. The good news is that since we’ve run well over a million parties, we can just look under the hood and see what’s going on!
So you have to ask yourself, why do 9 out of 10 of our customers have no problems with their online parties while 1 out of 10 has tons of problems?
In this article we are going to break down why this happens, and what you can do about it. If you follow these simple strategies your success will accelerate, and you can leave your party posting woes behind!
Why do blocks happen?
If you imagine the size and scope of Facebook and the numbers of posts that get posted to their site on an ongoing basis this will start to make sense. In the first quarter of 2024, Meta reported that they have over 3.24 BILLION daily active users. And it's reported that over 350 million pictures are uploaded to Facebook each day.
So you can imagine the enormous stream of posts going on to Facebook at any given time. The vast majority of those posts are made by people just like you and me in legitimate ways and for legitimate purposes. However, there are some people who abuse Facebook by spamming.
Facebook has advanced algorithms that are put in place to monitor this massive amount of posts and weed out what appears to be spammy posts. When they identify a spammy post, that results in a block.
Does using PostMyParty's Chrome extension raise my risk of being blocked by Facebook?
With the use of any new tool for your business, it's wise to access the benefits and any potential disadvantages it may bring.
Using the extension does not increase your risk of being blocked by Facebook. However, how you choose to use it - or any method you use to post, even manually - can result in your account being temporarily blocked. You'll still want to practice the good habits and guidelines presented here in order to avoid landing in the dreaded "Facebook Jail."
Don't Post Too Fast
I'm leading with our #1 tip! The main thing that can get people into trouble is just posting way too much and way too fast. Ideally, you want to have a minimum of 6-10 minutes between posts going out of your account to Facebook. Including this buffer of time is helpful in the extension having time to upload and publish your media, and is a good deterrent of Facebook not blocking your account for posting too fast!
Occasionally when a post is blocked Facebook will send you an error message that says,
“It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it.”
Facebook’s algorithm takes into account the speed of the posts you are making. They even tell you that in their main help article about getting blocked. You can read that here, it’s the first item on their list: “Why am I blocked from sharing on Facebook?“
I can understand that might be tricky to do depending on your volume of posts. If that's the case, you may want to consider reducing the volume of posts in your template in order to provide enough space between any posts leaving your account.
The reality is that it actually takes very few posts to have a very successful party on Facebook. If you are posting every catalog photo from your company into a party, then you are just overwhelming your guests, and that strategy just doesn’t work well.
Facebook takes into account the engagement level your posts generate when determining whether to show that post or notify people that you made it. Publishing many posts with low engagement yields fewer positive results, compared with posting less frequently with lots engagement!
Another thing to keep in mind too, is keeping your posts well-spaced even when you have multiple parties at a time. The greater the distance between your template posts, the easier it will be to...
Space Your Parties Out
There is another element to this situation that's worth talking about. How do you keep your posts well spaced out when you run multiple posts at a time?
Let’s say you have 5 parties for the week, and schedule those all to happen at say 7PM on a Thursday. If you have each one of those parties scheduled with the same template and the same start date, you're essentially scheduling 5 posts to publish at the exact same time, for the duration of those parties.
That's a quick way to get some attention from Facebook. The unwanted kind.
Facebook sees that and thinks, “Hey, you're trying to spam a bunch of groups." - even though your content is legitimate.
We highly recommend that if you want to have multiple parties at the same time that you offset the posting times so that they aren’t all going out at the same minute. We make this really easy to do! Just space them out some using the Adjust Post feature given at the top of every scheduled party. How much you want to space them out by is dependent on the volume of posts in your template, but again - we recommend 6-10 minutes apart at minimum.
Publish Posts as your Business Page Profile
I want to mention something else that is highly relevant, and that is posting as your business page name.
We work with our users one-on-one every day, and can tell you that the people posting parties in as their business page have far less of a problem than people posting as their personal profile.
We highly recommend that you use your business page for your parties. This is a business you are building right? You need to be using a Facebook Page to build your brand and business. Simply put, Facebook favors business-type content to be posted by a business page, rather than a personal profile.
Here is more information about how to publish posts as your business page.
Why Do Corporate Images Make This Problem Worse?
Do you know those lovely social media images that corporate produces for you and distributes to hundreds of thousands of their people?
Well, most people, like you, use those in legitimate ways, by posting parties into groups that they are an admin of who kindly invited people to those groups.
However, there are a ton of people that take those same images, and just spam them into random groups that are not their own. They might take those same images and post them into multiple random groups at the same time with the thought that maybe they’ll get some sales from that. The truth is actually the opposite, those posts will be marked as spam instantly by the admins and members of those groups.
So Facebook is really smart, sort of. Why wait to block posts until they get reported as spam? Instead, why not make a big list of all the posts that get reported as spam, and then instantly block those posts if they ever see them again, regardless of who is posting them and where they are posting them.
And that is basically what happens on Facebook. Periodically Facebook will adjust their algorithm and block a lot of this duplicated content that they have flagged as spam. This content usually turns out to be the images that are produced by corporate since so many people end up using those. It can be other images though too if they are widely spread around.
If you are posting that same content into the groups you are an admin of, Facebook doesn’t care that you’re the admin and that the people in the group have opted in to see that content by joining the group.
Facebook just blocks that content, and may even give you a warning on that content, saying something to the effect that the post violates their community standards. Facebook may even place a temporary lock on your account preventing you from making any additional posts for a while.
How have they determined that the post violates their community standards? Well, it’s not because a human is actually looking at the post and thinking about the situation. Do you remember how many images I told you were upload each day? It would be impossible for them to do it that way.
It’s that their algorithm instantly detects that that content has been marked as spam before, and you are just getting caught up in it as an innocent victim. If you actually look at Facebook’s official Community Standards, you won’t find anything in there saying that you can’t post parties or other promotional content into groups that you are the administrator of. It’s simply that some of this widely shared and copied content gets abused and ultimately flagged as spammy content.
Why Facebook Loves Unique Content
This is why it’s absolutely critical that if you want to have long term success with Facebook parties that you take the time to make your parties unique. And by unique I don’t mean downloading the same images from corporate and putting them in a different order in your party.
By unique I mean that each image you post needs to be created by you. At the very minimum, you should place your own personal brand watermark on each image you post in your parties. You can use a tool like Canva.com to do this easily. Learn more strategies for using images by checking out this article.
All of the text in your posts need to be unique and created by you. If you receive a shared template from someone, then take the time to edit those images and change up the text and make the party your own.
If you share a template with someone, even though we tell them in the email they receive to do so, you should also tell them that they must make the effort to make their template unique before using the template in a party.
We have an article that is helpful to send along with your shared templates, to help aid them in how to edit that template.