Facebook Jail: how does a small business owner get blocked from Facebook for 6 weeks?
Missing In Action
I’d missing a Facebook friend for some weeks. I like his snarky humour. But I hadn’t seen any posts from him in weeks. Was he blocked on Facebook again I wondered.
How does a small business owner get blocked on Facebook because of his business pictures?
Facebook Jail
Ryan landed in Facebook Jail for six weeks because of his business pictures posted on his personal Facebook account.
Ryan has a men’s underwear business. The pictures he posted of his products are not like Victoria’s Secret (would you call that Albert’s secret?). You can’t even see the face of his model, he doesn’t hire expensive photographers or use fancy backgrounds. It’s like pictures from a Sears catalogue. And not as racy as what you can see on some billboards around town. Check out his website here so you can see for yourself.
But Facebook has decided to censor Ryan and pictures of his business products.
I have to wonder if partly this is Facebook not so subtly folks to buy ads for their business Facebook pages. I’ve been annoyed how Facebook has tinkered with my feed so I don’t see frequent updates from the businesses I follow. A lot of them are clients and I like to know what they’re doing and what they’re writing about. And that tinkering with frequency of business posts in my feed happened just as Facebook was rolling out their ads for business.
Google Goliath
Another tech giant strikes against small business story.
Recently Google announced that it’s Chrome browser would start marking sites that require logins as insecure if the site doesn’t use an SSL certificate starting in January 2017. Shortly after that Chrome will mark any website insecure (with a big red X) that doesn’t use SSL certificates.
What is SSL?
SSL certificates or Secure Sockets Layer certificate is the way a browser (like Chrome or Firefox) guarantee that the website you’re visiting is certified to be the correct site. How you see that in the your browser is that the address has a s in the address example https:/facebook.com and you can see a green lock.
More detailed technical explanation here.
You purchase this certificate for your website (prices range from $15 a year to $300 depending on how much ecommerce you’re doing).
How does this Google announcement affect your small business?
Even if you do not use ecommerce on your website, you will be forced to fork over dollars just to maintain your safety rating and your SEO ranking. You will have the annual cost of the certificate plus the cost of installing it.
