EPISODE 16 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: I ENDED UP IN FACEBOOK JAIL. HOW TO AVOID IT HAPPENING TO YOU (+ WHAT TO DO IF IT DOES!).

Sonya:

Hey, guys. So a few weeks back, the unthinkable happened. I was in the middle of a launch for not one, but two clients. So our strategy is we're relying heavily on Facebook and Instagram advertising and this wasn't just going to a cold audience. It was a warm audience of their website traffic, engaged followers and also their email list as well. So you actually do this by uploading Custom Audiences in the backend of Ads Manager. If you haven't jumped onboard that yet, you really need to go and check that out. Episode coming soon on that, I promise. 

Anyway, so I woke up one morning to jump in and make adjustments to the campaigns and, bam, I could see all of the ads were still running and I had no way of actually being able to edit them. So, of course, this completely freaked me out, especially as I dove into all of my other client ad accounts and realized that it wasn't the actual ad account that had been blocked. It was just my profile managing the ads.

So this had come about after I'd just taken on a new client. She had like 140,000 followers on Instagram. She just added me to her Business Manager and I could see that she was blocked as well. So I thought maybe it was kind of an association thing? Anyway, so the error message was along the lines of, "We've restricted your advertising permissions as you have breached our terms of use."

What? I haven't crossed those terms of use like nothing else because I've heard of this happening and I knew that I'd done nothing against Facebook rules. So they gave me the option to appeal and I did. But after I hadn't heard back from them for 24 hours, I started to panic because, obviously, we had big budgets and these ads running in the background, I had no way to even get them switched off.

So I'm not sure if you guys know this, but Facebook actually has a live chat support tool for those of you who've had your pages set up in the Business Manager. It's another the reason to jump on board this. So what I did was head to Google and I literally typed in Facebook Business Help and its first result says Business Help Center.

Now if you scroll down, it says, "Do you still need help?" So it'll take you through all of these different prompts and options to try and get you to troubleshoot it yourself. I always just keep scrolling until I can actually chat to someone. So follow these prompts and you'll hit the point where you can actually initiate a live chat or send them an email. And I can not tell you how many times I do this awake. I mean, Facebook has been super glitchy whenever they make updates, which is constantly, so I'm always appealing things. I'm always in there having a chat to them and just get our ads passed and make sure everything's running smoothly and rolling out as it needs to be.

That's the thing with Facebook ads. I think a lot of people think that they could book a session with us, we'll help them set up the initial ads and then they think it's a set-and-forget thing. And it really, really doesn't work that way. Like there's continuous optimization that needs to happen, especially if you do have a larger budget.

So, unfortunately, in this scenario, they were super unhelpful on the Facebook live chat and they couldn't tell me anything. They just advised me to keep appealing until I got an answer. But they couldn't even tell me why this had happened, citing something about a security restriction that wasn't allowing them to tell me.

So of course, again, panicking over here and so I kept appealing. I can advise you that if you do ever need to appeal anything and you need to write a reason, make sure you are super friendly and apologetic, even if you know that you haven't done anything wrong.

Anyway, three days in, I had a one-on-one strategy session with a business and they mentioned this scenario had happened to them the month prior while I was helping them set up their Facebook ads. So they also told me it took three weeks before they got a response and when they finally did, it was a mistake by Facebook. So just to preface that, they had been affected well before I started working with them so it wasn't a link to me.

But the story ends well, guys. Do not worry. 24 hours later, my profile was unblocked and Facebook sent me a message informing me that it had been a mistake on their end. Very disappointing when I was spending so much money per day on these campaigns and I didn't even have a way to pause them. Thankfully, our client launches were still successful.

So what can we learn from this? Well, number one, Facebook has gotten so big that a lot of their decisions in terms of security and their terms of use are now automated. If you ever get an ad rejected, always, always appeal it. And if your account gets frozen, like my did, don't panic. It should be fine.

Also, go and read up on the terms of use so you don't actually get put into the real Facebook jail, because I have heard of people having this happen to their entire accounts and it will be deleted. So I spoke to Desiree from Fashion Fingers earlier on this podcast and she ended up in Facebook jail because she was misusing the chatbot terms of use. Maybe you've been running ads for years and have a season's pixel. This can be a killer for a business relying on Facebook leads.

So to check out these terms of use, just Google Facebook Advertising Policies and it will be the first result that pops up, which brings me to my next point. Seriously, start collecting email addresses. You don't have to email people. You can simply use it to advertise that audience on Facebook by uploading them into the backend of Business Manager as a Custom Audience. 

But it does highlight that you cannot rely on one channel for your marketing. And I know I sound like a broken record with this, but having a single channel approach is not a good longterm solution. You really need a multi-channel approach because once it all dries up or it's been blocked, you're screwed.

And just to say something else, I honestly thought that email marketing was dead, but I'm getting [inaudible 00:06:17] Sarah from Good House on the podcast again soon because she has had some incredible results recently from email marketing, something like 35K worth of sales in two weeks for a traditional business that didn't actually have a massive list. That is insane.

So thanks for listening, guys. Here's hoping you don't end up in Facebook jail, like I did.