Hello,
You created a Page that has violated our Terms of Use, and this Page has been removed. Facebook Pages are special profiles used solely for commercial, political, or charitable purposes. Among other things, Pages that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. We also take down Pages that attack an individual or group, or that are set up by an unauthorized individual. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features could result in your account being disabled.
If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit the Terms applicable to Facebook Pages at http://www.facebook.com/terms_pages.php.
The Facebook Team
This is the message that greeted me the other day. They have shut down the BMW South Africa Facebook page. No specific reasons given, no chance given to rectify the situation, just a one-way command. And a link to see if you can work it out yourself.
After going through the Terms pages I couldn’t find anything that looks like a fair reason for the page deletion. The only thing left to do is to scratch through facebook.com looking for an email address or some kind of contact channel, which i eventually find (a small contact form box).
After a day wait the response arrives:
Hi Scott,
We can enable your Page for you, but we will need to confirm that you are the authorized representative of BMW. To help us verify this, please write us an email from an email address associated with this company. Please be sure to include all of our previous correspondence. Once we receive this email, we can continue assisting you with enabling your Facebook Page.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Reece
Customer Operations Representative
As this happens on the weekend, I can only access work email 2 days later, sending them proof of my bmw.co.za address. Today I receive another message with further steps to rectify the situation. With Facebook being on the west coast of the USA, our responses only arrive the next day.
A word of warning to those thinking about using this platform: when there’s only one partner in the “relationship” that can do as it pleases, you need to be sure that whatever you’re doing should not rely 100% on it. Facebook encourages you to set up pages and run campaigns from it, but will shut you down without even giving you a chance to respond. When you are reaching a critical mass of members and community momentum is starting to pick up, this is a terrible thing to happen.
Are Facebook putting the consumer/customer first? i think not. To me they’re just another corporation that have grown to the point where they can dictate the terms whether you like it or not. And it has left a bitter taste.
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