Facebook can be a great networking tool for business, but make sure you use it properly and follow the rules, or you may lose your account — and your connections.

Most people who use Facebook don’t spare a thought about whether their Facebook account will be disabled. While I was researching this article, I visited a section of Facebook’s blog that I call “Facebook Purgatory.” This is where the poor souls who have had their accounts disabled go to desperately plead with Facebook to reinstate their accounts. Most have no idea why their account has been disabled, and some have been waiting for weeks without a response from Facebook about whether their accounts would be re-enabled. Facebook Purgatory is a sad place, and I hope you never end up there.

Since Facebook is a private company, they can do what they like with their site. They set their terms and conditions, and if you breach them, they choose if and when they will reinstate your account. The best defense you have is to play within their rules; otherwise you risk losing your friends, photos, videos, notes and any other data you have shared.

There are at least 12 ways you can get your Facebook account disabled:

1. Using Your Personal Profile for Business Purposes

Facebook wants you to use the page profiles for business and keep your personal profile just that — per­sonal. They state, “You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain.” Therefore, promoting your products and services through your personal pro­file could get you thrown off.

2.Using a Fake Name

Facebook wants you to interact with real people and doesn’t tolerate fake names, business names or abbrevia­tions (such as using one letter as your last name) on a personal profile.

3. Changing Your Name Too Often

Most people change their name very few times, if at all, in their lifetime. Facebook uses multiple name changes to flag people who are breaking the “fake name” clause. However, if you legitimately change your name, you have nothing to worry about.

4. Sending Too Many Friend Requests in a Short Period of Time

It seems counterintuitive that a social networking tool would limit how you can add friends, but they do. After you initially join and upload your address books, they think your friends should grow organically and slowly. So how many friends are safe to add per day? They don’t share this useful information with us, but I would suggest adding no more than 20 friends a day.

Whatever you do, never ignore messages from Facebook that warn you to slow down on adding friends. If you receive this message from Facebook, don’t add any new friends for a couple of weeks.

5. Overuse of Your Inbox

It seems the Inbox feature is not your average mail client. Facebook doesn’t want users sending a lot of bulk messages from the inbox. You can only send a message to a maximum of 20 people. If you send the same mes­sage to multiple groups of 20 people, or send bulk mes­sages often, you may get flagged as a spammer.

6. Being Reported for Spam

Each message you send includes a “Report Spam” button. When someone clicks this button, Facebook re­views the message (and probably all of your other activi­ties) to determine whether or not they consider it spam. All promotions that occur outside of a business page could be considered spam.

I’m going to share a dirty little secret here: some people would rather hit the “Report Spam” button than ask you not to send them information or unfriend you. It’s easier and anonymous. Be conscious of what you send, since you are always at risk of someone reporting you.

7. Engaging in Suspicious Behavior After Time Away

If you haven’t used Facebook for a while (say for over a month), there might be a backlog of friend re­quests to process. From there it seems natural that you want to message some people and add some other new friends. However, people in Facebook Purgatory report being banned from Facebook after a hiatus because they added too many new friends or sent too many messages. Remember to space out your activities.

8. Resending the Same Message to Your Friends, Event or Group Members

Facebook doesn’t like duplicate messages; they think they’re spam. This means resending a message as a reminder to your friends, event invitees or to group members is a big no-no. Instead, Facebook recommends adding more people as administrators to an event or group. The extra administrators can send messages to their friends, rather than having you resend the same messages to the same people. Facebook has automatic flags that notify them of this behavior. If they check your message and see that it’s for “commercial gain,” you can kiss your account goodbye.

9.Using Inbox Messages to Chat

Facebook says, “The inbox functionality is not intended for the purpose of having live con­versations with people. If you would like to do this, we recommend using the Facebook chat feature.” Multiple messages to the same person in a short period of time could be classified as spam.

10. Multiple People Blocking You

Each profile has an option to “report/block this person.” While Facebook would regard the occasional block as part of human relationships (like bad breakups), flags go up if the number of people blocking you is abnormally high, or if you are blocked a lot in a short period of time.

11. Getting Reported

The report part of “report/block this per­son” function prompts the user to give a rea­son for their report. Reasons include nudity or pornography, fake profiles, racist/hate speech, threatening behavior and unwanted contact. “Unwanted contact” is pretty vague. Facebook will review any report and look at your activity to see if it’s legitimate. If you’re using your per­sonal profile for business promotions and you are reported, your account will be disabled.

12. Using Faulty or Intensive 3rd Party Applications to Access Facebook

You can access Facebook via different websites or applications such as mobile clients. These are not developed by Facebook, but by third party developers, and they interact with Facebook using your credentials. If they have been poorly developed or they refresh often (for example, every 5 minutes), Facebook may see this as spamming behavior and suspend your account. A big culprit seems to be SkyBook, a Facebook client for Windows Mobile — so avoid that one. Limit how you connect to Facebook by using their website and one trusted mobile application.

If your account ever gets disabled, visit:
www.facebook.com/help/contact. php?show_form=disabled

Note of advice: Once you have logged the request, be patient. Multiple requests are re­ported to slow the process down, and Facebook is notorious for taking their time to review dis­abled accounts.