My Love & Hate Relationship with Facebook Business :)

A Fan of Facebook and of Facebook Fan Pages

I have been using Facebook since 2009 with a couple of personal accounts to stay connected with family and friends like most people do. I explored Facebook Fan pages for one of my e-learning projects back in 2014 but didn't do much with it. But I LOVED to see the potential.

Black Friday Ads ON and OFF ALL Weekend!

In preparation for the Wealthy Affiliate Black Friday promo, I decided to launch a campaign even if I don't have much of a tribe on my Fan Pages. This is one of my goals for the new year. I have a total of three Fan Pages for three different niches and I intend to use them to build my follow and also use Groups, live sessions and all that the platform has to offer to promote my products and services. Promoting Wealthy Affiliate was my TOP priority so I was so determined to make it happen, only to realize that my ads would get approved and then disabled. After a day or so approved again and then disabled. It was ON and OFF. And this was Black Friday weekend!!!

What a Nightmare!

I contacted Support and appealed the decision as I have a legitimate business and what I was promoting was also a legitimate affiliate program. I have my privacy policy also entered on the account Page Info tab. But it was useless, all I got was a series of automated responses: Thank you for appealing the decision, we have re-activated your account, but it was not true, my account continued to show restricted as in the screenshot shown above. I was not able to BOOST a post, CREATE an ad or LAUNCH a campaign. And it was Black Friday Weekend! And Monday was Cyber Monday, what a perfect day to promote an online business! :)

101 Invalid Reasons

After creating a post and linking it to my Bootcamp site, Facebook gave me the reason that my account was disabled because my ads were not compliant with FB advertising policies (which was not true), that the image contained too much text (which was not true, it was the beautiful graphic we all got for Black Friday, some of you even added more to it, I LOVED to see those cat's eyes!). I kept appealing the decision and TODAY, Needless to say I also experienced problems on Instagram. I was thinking: Could these guys just let me do this?

AND, twenty (YES! You are reading right, 20!) days later, that means TODAY, I got this message from Facebook Support (this is for us to be so grateful to our wonderful SiteSupport here!):

Today at 9:35 AM

Hi Paula,
We reviewed your Facebook account and determined that access to advertising features was incorrectly disabled. We've reinstated your access to advertising. Any ads that were affected will return to their previous status.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Thanks,
The Facebook Business Team
Vincent

I Want You to Learn from My Mistakes...

Oh, boy! Yes, I accept the apology but it was a real incovenience. Just sharing this so you start advertising WAY ahead of Black Friday, at least a month before so your ads run without problems. As Kyle did here on the wealthyaffiliate.com website with a timer until we reached Black Friday. Then I won't end 20 days later with such few visits and clicks on my ads... Take a look:

I have learned my lesson and am determined to

1. Invite one friend at a time to LIKE my page so I can grow my tribe :)

2. Launch campaigns ahead of time to allow for debugging if need be.

I was so confident that by creating a business account on both Facebook and Instagram I was NOT going to run into any compliance problems, but I guess I took too much for granted and their tech support really sucks. When I got this message today I thought: Are you kidding me? :)

What has been your own experience with Facebook Ads so far? Would you like to share here?

Merry Christmas, everyone! :)

Paula

PS: Please read the reply that I posted below Curtis's comment as it might shed light on this issue...