A little advice if you depend solely on Facebook

OK, it has been a week since I lost my FB account and there had been no response to my appeal yet. And I was advised by some "FB experts" to give it two weeks for FB to consider my appeal, just to be safe. For those of you who came in late and wondered how I lost it, just click on the link above for the juicy details. Yeah, FB seems to know better than me about my very existence in this world.

And for the whole week I had my family and friends coming to me asking what happened, and, why not try this or do that, The fact is, there is really nothing more I can do to get my account re-activated except wait for the outcome of my appeal. For those of you who have lost your account before (for no legit reason), you'd probably know the feeling, and for those who haven't, hopefully it doesn't happen to you. But for the sake of argument, let's say it does happen to you, and you feel your life depended on your FB account, what can you do?

First thing first is to make sure your life don't depend on FB alone. If you sit back and really think about it, is it sane to put everything into one basket if it was that important? I had to learn this twice now, but I am lucky as my life or lively hood didn't depend on the loss of my first blog or my FB account. This is just merely an annoyance for me, and a minor set back. But what about you?


Understand how Facebook works

In a way,  I think I already know part of the reason for my account getting disabled. FB is for the most part administered by computer algorithms that seeks out certain elements within the social media network. The moment they detects certain "violations", they are programmed to suspend or disable the account responsible, punishment based according to their violations. A friend of mine searched my name in FB when he couldn't find me, and found 4-5 other accounts with my name (exactly to the letter) that had no images for their profile page, with no post and no or less than 10 friends. I am guessing since there were so many "fake" accounts with my name in it (actually I am flattered my name is so popular), and since I am probably the only one with my name active on a daily basis, I must be the one going around creating these fake accounts. Kind of a weird rationale since if I was going to create fake accounts, wouldn't it be stupid of me to use my own name for all of them? Go figure.

What this also means is that your FB accounts are not entirely secure. Anything can happen to it as FB has listed a lot of violations which can be misinterpreted by these algorithms.

FB as of June 2014 have about 1.3 billion users, so now you understand why the company do not have a proper customer service department, but instead rely heavily on those computer algorithms. Imagine the amount of emails they would receive and how many they have to reply everyday. Hence to solve this problem, they need to be autocratic about their social networking site and create one sided rules so they don't have to bother with 1.3 billion people. It's cheap and life is indeed so much easier this way for them. So what if a couple of thousand people left, or got banned. They still have over a hundred thousand that stays. And what has this got to do with you? A lot actually if you love the social media limelight.


The Risk of Having Just a FB Page

I was talking to my mom last night about me sharing my passion for the scale modeling hobby using facebook. It's a great medium to gather a group of people who shares the same interest together, and I wanted for more people to participate with this hobby. When I created my FB page, I didn't expect it to grow significantly, and was really surprised with it as I was not related to any company, or associated with any celebrity or manufacturer. I simply did it because it was fun, and I wanted my circle to have fun, I got to interact with modelers around the globe and shared fabulous build-ups. And before I knew it, I was literally on FB everyday and checking my newsfeed constantly to see if there were any more great build-ups from various sites I could share from. And believe me, there are a lot out there. I thought this was great as I could use my site and my own friend's base to help me with networking.

Then this happened and within a span of a few seconds, I lost everything - again (last time was when the images in my old blog got wiped out - no thanks to the android blogger apps). So I decided to go back to blogging.

After creating my new blog (yeah, you're reading a post from it now), I went back to all the other blogs I was following previously (associated with my older now-defunct blog and those in my bookmark), and to my dismay, I found quite a few that had been closed down, while some had stop updating theirs altogether. Most of these people were in my friend's list, and some of them have their own FB pages (that I know of), just like mine - and are still quite active with them. I even know a few who depends on their FB pages for their source of income (where they highlight commission build services, or using it to sell their wares). It kind of made me wonder what would happen to them if FB decides to disable their account for whatsoever reason. Theirs would truly be an even greater disaster.

A check with all the forums I had frequented later (before I had my FB page), saw a drastic drop in the amount of people participating there. It didn't just happen to one or two, but ALL of them (those that I frequent). Even the moderators and site owners noticed this. The drop were mainly attributed to the fact that a lot of people have now turned to FB. I know this very well cause I too am guilty of this. The instant feedback and likes were very gratifying, compared to the response I get from forums.

Then I realized something else. Many out there are doing the same thing I did. We turned away from the old source and harped on to FB. So what happens if FB really did disable your account?


What should you do?

So, should you abandon or boycott facebook? Hell no. Despite it's flaws, FB do have it's advantages as well. But I strongly recommend diversifying your options, especially those who solely rely on FB alone for their income.

Back up your hard work with a more stable platform, a blog or a website if possible. Then re-direct those who follow you to follow your blog or website as well. This way, you are providing for a safer and firmer foundation for all your hard work. I find that highlighting your work or wares in blogs / website and then sharing them in your FB page works just as well as depending on your FB page alone.

The best way to back up your account's contact list is via email addresses. Try to get as many email addresses from your current list (the same one they used to create their FB account). You can't back up the contents in your pages or in your account, so don't bother. When and if you lose your FB account and you re-create a new one, send out a general email to everyone and get them to acknowledge your new email address (used to create your new FB account).  Use Gmail if possible. FB will then search out your friend's list via your email account. These will be more useful to you later. Wished I had thought about this earlier.


My new account

And when am I creating my new FB account? Ha, aaaah .... the moment I know for sure I lost my current one for good? To be honest, I was actually tempted to do so four days ago .. until I discovered that I got so many things done without FB distracting me. And I still have more stuff to do, like re-organizing my work room so I can get back to building kits again. Also rediscovered the joy of trolling the net for images and information for my blog like I did in the past.

But don't worry as this doesn't mean I am totally out of FB. Like I said, like or not, a lot of us still needs it. I will let everyone know once my new account is set up as there are many people that I'd love to reconnect back with. It's just that I'm not in a hurry to get one yet.