Folks, I’m going to keep this short and sweet. Some people join Facebook and add every widget possible to their profile. Then, they invite others to do so.

Not a good idea. I ignore most of them, but I shall comment on one in particular. There’s one where you can buy people. Then, they send you a message saying:

“I just bought you. Guess how much?”

Okay, if you haven’t noticed, I’m Black. And if you know anything about Black history, then you know that “buying” me is so not a cool idea. Even in fun.

My heart goes into my throat every time I see the “I just bought you. Guess how much?” widget. I’m sure my ancestors didn’t think it was cute when they were bought and sold hundreds of years ago. So, anyone who sends me that widget is quietly removed from my friends list.

This widget is just not fun to me. Not one bit. It insults me, my culture, my ancestors and everything that’s not cool about that dark part of our collective history. If you’re that careless and thoughtless, then what else are you going to be careless and thoughtless about if we do business together?

Yes, I’m making an assumption. Perception is everything online. That’s why you have to be very aware of the widgets you’re adding to your profile, especially if you’re using Facebook for business.

I’ve made it no secret over the past couple of months that I don’t think Facebook is a useful tool for businesses. Recently, I told you how:

• Facebook is ruining my social life due to all my business contacts who are now trying to be friends with the 15 year old youths from my church who are on my friends list, and;
• Facebook is penalizing you if you are too popular, given what happened to Nathan Stobezki who got kicked off of Facebook after fans of his fashion website started to send close to 50 friend requests to Nathan a week.

It appears that Facebook is clamping down on your popularity. It’s beginning to become less useful for business folks who have a large client base.

My friend, Nancy Marmolejo, who blogs over at Viva Visibility, has an excellent post containing some tips on how NOT to get banned on Facebook. These tips come via Maria Reyes-McDavis and she states:

1. Don’t use applications.
2. Don’t send messages to more than 20 people in a given day.
3. Be careful of the groups you belong to.
4. Don’t become a fan of someone who is on Facebook’s radar.

I feel as if I’ve been sent to the Facebook principal’s office. So, I can’t be too popular, I can’t have fun and I might as well just sit on my hands when I login to Facebook. How effective can it be for me to send a message to just 20 people a day? Not effective at all.

You know what? I’ll stick to my blog, podcast, Twitter and ezine in my online marketing toolkit. I can’t be bothered with Facebook any longer.

So, I’m sitting next to my sister. My sister is 11 years younger than me (she’s in her early 20s). She’s a Facebook power user.

She’s working on her laptop, I’m working on mine. Here’s our conversation:

“Lee, who’s this?” My sister turns her laptop to show me a friend request from some middle aged white dude on Facebook.

“Oh, that’s someone I met at Podcamp last year.”

“Why does he want to be my friend so bad?”

“I dunno. Why?” I ask my sister.

“This is the third time he’s requesting to be my friend and this is the third time I’m going to ignore his request.”

“Three times?”

“Yes and I have nothing in common with him. Why does he insist on being my friend?”

“I dunno. Maybe he likes your smile?” I say jokingly to my sister.

“Well, I don’t care why. I’m just going to keep ignoring their requests. Unless it’s someone I play football with or went to school with or work with, I’m not going to accept requests from people who only want to be my friend because they know you. Can’t you tell them to stop?”

So, for the love of God, STOP! Not everyone on my friends list should be invited to yours. I mean, some of the people on my friends list are teenagers from my church. They’re on my friends list because they think it’s cool that one of the older women is actually on Facebook (I’m the older woman to them).

Others are old classmates that I haven’t seen in years. Others are from my Wednesday afternoon social bridge club. Others are family members - cousins, sisters. And the rest are people I’ve met at conferences or requested my friendship through  a business contact on Facebook.

More on Facebook is Ruining My Social Life

I’ve seen a plethora of individuals popping up recently claiming to be an “expert” on how to use Facebook for business. Doesn’t bother me one bit, but what does is that these Facebook “experts” end up being cheerleaders of a tool that locks people’s accounts if the person becomes too popular.

This is what happened to Robert Scoble about 2 months ago. Robert Scoble is an A-list tech blogger and he had over 4000 friends in Facebook. Then one day, Facebook closed his account with no warning.

When he tried to find out “What gives?” he was told that he was running a script which is against Facebook’s terms and conditions. His account was reinstated, but Scoble does less Facebooking these days.

The regularity of how often Facebook deletes people’s profiles due to popularity (and while NOT running a script) is quite alarming to me (Scoble details it here and here). Scoble also interviewed Nathan Stebeski Stobezki who recently who got kicked off Facebook for getting too many friend requests.

Nathan was getting 48 requests a week because people on his very popular fashion website went to Facebook to request his friendship. Listen to the 10 minute interview between Scoble and Nathan below.

 

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This is alarming to me since I run events and I tell people to become my friend. Due to the Social Media Telesummit and the fact that some big name Internet marketers have joined Facebook recently (such as the Ezine Queen, Alex Mandossian, Travis Greenlee, Michael Port, etc), I’ve been getting around 25 friend requests a week through Facebook.

Just yesterday, I couldn’t login to my account for most of the day due to “site maintenance”. Which was odd since others (like my sisters) were both able to get into their accounts and we’re all on the same ip. In other words, we were all at home and when I tried to login to my Facebook account from my laptop sitting right beside my sister, I kept getting the “site maintenance” message. She was able to login to her account with no problems.

While I use it to connect with people, I no longer use Facebook to promote my brand or generate leads. I don’t want to put in all that energy into building my friends’ list and groups, only to have my account closed because I decide to send a message to my list of 1000 friends to announce the launch of something I’m doing.

That’s why I’m looking forward to seeing what Wordpress will do with Buddypress. Buddypress is social networking plugin for Wordpress. That means I can build my own friends list and start my own groups on this blog. In other words, I own the data and it will reside in my database.

So, beware. Use Facebook, but don’t send too many messages, don’t have too many friends and don’t tell people at large scale events that you attend to become your Facebook friend. Otherwise, you’ll be labeled a spammer. And beware of Facebook “experts” who just cheerlead about the tool. They really need to understand the underbelly of this tool and advise accordingly.