Whew.
I was very disheartened and frustrated.
Even though I don’t personally like Facebook, I know many people still do. This is why I made a Facebook business page and event for the 2019 Hand Job Market.
I was starting to get noticed by people. I posted a call for vendors on a Vendors Group page.
Not all the attention was positive. Some people did not like my event name. They did not recognize the depth of the name and/or the original meaning of a hand job. They reported my event name and URL as indecent.
So I guess if a few people do this, the Facebook robot automatically blacklists you. This really sucks because a robot that doesn’t understand context makes this decision and then I loose the chance to advertise my budding event.
This made advertising my event very difficult. I couldn’t post anything with my event name or URL. I know this had lost my vendor booth sales.
I tried circumventing the rules by posting videos to Facebook, but not everyone wants to watch a whole video. A quick glance at a graphic with my logo is all that is needed to catch people’s attention. I couldn’t do that.
I tried very hard to find a way to try to contact someone in Facebook, but I kept getting bounced around self-serve FAQ interfaces. Facebook has no customer support phone line. I couldn’t do anything but abandon Facebook. I could focus on other channels, and on printed flyers. This was going to take a lot more time and money.
I started diving into ads on the radio and streaming music websites. I was stewing in anger about the Facebook people. (It would be one thing if my logo has a penis, but all my graphics show handmade crafts.)
It may sound odd, but I decided to do the stick figure exercise. It actually worked great for eliminating complaint emails about my name, so maybe it could work with my anger towards Facebook.
The stick figure exercise is where you draw yourself as a stick figure, label it with your name, draw radiating light from the figure, then do the same for the person or thing you are having trouble with. After that, you connect your chakras to the other, and physically cut the paper in half.
Immediately after that, I felt lighter and more optimistic. I decided to try to find a human again to explain my situation to. I finally found a contact form buried under a bunch of FAQs. I filled out the form and hoped for the best.
The next morning, a human contacted me. She said she understood three issue and needed to send an appeal to someone else.
A few days later, she got back to me and said my URL was mistakenly blocked. She now unblocked it. I immediately tried it. The URL had been whitelisted.
Why does this matter? Some vendor prospects were complaining my page didn’t have enough likes. I couldn’t advertise my page with the blocks. Now I can can advertise but so close to the event, I will target guests.
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