Internet Marketing Gets Slapped By Facebook

If you have an interest in Internet Marketing or frequent Facebook you've probably heard the hype about Facebook being the next goldmine for Internet Marketers. Facebook offers an Ad product that has some similarity to Google Adwords while incorporating some very important differences.

You can place ads on Facebook with a 25 character headline, small images and 135 characters of description. The ads are context sensitive just like Google's. The ads appear in a right hand column of Facebook pages just like Adwords ads appear on the right of Google search pages. The most important difference is that Facebook users are generally not searching for products. Facebook targets the Ads by using the demographics in a Facebook users profile. For example, if you indicated you live in a certain city in your profile you will likely receive ads from businesses in that city. If you indicate an interest in a subject like Internet Marketing your will see those type of ads.

At first look this seems like a great way to advertise. With Facebook passing 500 million users and the ability to laser target ads to your market, how can you go wrong? That's what I thought to until I got the "Facebook Slap"! It appears that even worse than Google, Facebook has a zealous army of ad police that enforce a restrictive a set of polices aimed at keeping the Facebook page real estate arbitrarily "pristine" ??

I added the question marks above because I've never been convinced that ads for the "porn" industry are better than ads for "work at home schemes". However it appears that Facebook allows adult ads but strictly prohibits "work from home" products regardless of quality. I personally never endorse companies or products that make claims they can't back. Yet I had an ad for the Internet Marketing Center's Extreme Etool Kit banned because it, (according to the Facebook police), positioned itself as a "work from home" product!

In fact the Internet Marketing Center has been around for over 10 years and has a flawless record of helping website owners create successful online businesses. For those of you not familiar with this product it is a suite of software tools and services that allow you to quickly and easily select an online market and build a profitable website. It goes without saying that as a affiliate for IMC I thought their current promotion with a "double your money back guarantee" was a great deal. I was stumping for it everywhere I could including in Facebook ads. You can learn more about this product here.

You may or may not realize that the most recent Google slap, where Google canceled many advertiser accounts, resulted primarily from United States Federal Trade Commission's implementation of new disclosure guidelines. These guidelines were aimed at the rash of downright fraudulent websites promising huge profits from using Google's advertising tools. These sites often made outlandish claims then took their customers money and ran.

The significant change in the FTC guidelines made all parties profiting from the fraudulent advertising liable for damages. That meant that if Google profited from Adwords ads for these types of sites, they could get pulled into lawsuits for false advertising. Since many, if not most, of the rogue sites made false claims about Google products, it is at least understandable that Google reacted by not allowing landing pages to use the Google name or trademarks and canceled advertiser accounts that appeared to follow that pattern.

To the best of my knowledge Facebook has never been implicated in such schemes. I find their over zealous banning of "work at home" advertising to arbitrarily discriminate against a legitimate growing market of online products. I'm tired of large ad carriers like Google and Facebook slapping and arbitrarily appointing themselves as judge, jury and executioner while discriminating against legal business advertising. It was never the intent of the FTC to ban advertising from specific markets nor was it the intent of the FTC to allow companies "profile" advertisers in a manner reminiscent of racial profiling.