Facebook is notorious for banning accounts in a cruel way for an endless number of reasons, some of which are frankly ridiculous. Everyone who’s worked with Facebook knows the drill. Sometimes it’s enough to mention an unfortunate spare part of a bicycle (been there myself) and you can bid your profile farewell, for a week or two anyway.
Facebook doesn’t necessarily care about the context of your words, so it doesn’t always have to be anything offensive or inappropriate.
You can skip this introduction and proceed to the next steps:
Apart from the obvious obnoxiousness and vulgarisms, the “forbidden” list contains many other words such as “stupid”, “ugly”, or “thief”. Not to mention random animal names used in an unfortunate context.
Of course, Facebook doesn’t understand the very concept of sarcasm or more complex context, and we can’t help it. Although many bans as a consequence of user-reported or self-searched violations are actually justified, Facebook will not fail to go back all the way to your posts from high school, either. For example, to those old posts where you were exchanging inappropriate phrases with your friends (admit it, we were all teenagers once). Essentially, the constantly improving algorithm can scan our profiles up to several years back.
It seems that in the attempt to fight any potential hate speeches, Facebook can go a long way and give a hard time even to those who did not do anything inappropriate. The Facebook ban may block a specific function on our profile (for example, commenting, liking, sending private messages) or your entire account (then you cannot use Facebook at all, not even to post as a Facebook page).
If you need help in recovering your account, regaining access to a hacked Facebook page, or simply would like to know more about safety on Facebook, sign up for our Facebook group where we help each other with such issues. Should you need any assistance, I will also be happy to help you in private – just complete a form.
A ban normally lasts between a few hours and several weeks. However, or in the worst-case scenario, you can get a so-called permanent ban and never regain access to the account.
What is even worse, the ban on your private account will have an impact on the pages you manage. Even if you’ve always perfectly communicated with your fans on your page, if your page gets banned you won’t be able to get back to them.
It doesn’t matter if you use your account to communicate with a small group of users in your niche or if your Facebook page is your main source of income. Facebook can close your private account, delete your Facebook page, or deactivate your advertising account at any time – without giving you a warning or explanation. After all, it’s a private portal, nobody owns “the right to Facebook”, and everybody who cares about their content needs a back-up plan, right?
Of course. However, we live in a reality where (whether we like it or not) we are strongly dependent on giant corporations such as Facebook, Google, or Youtube (or Google). Hence, instead of fighting them we should think of a way to tailor them to our needs and enjoy their benefits despite all the inconveniences.
That’s why I attempted to figure out how to bypass a ban on a private account and maintain communication with your fans via the Facebook page. In conclusion to this lengthy introduction, here’s what to do when access to your private account is banned.
Business Manager
First things first – no matter what the situation is, create an account in Business Manager, then connect your pages and any advertising accounts to it.
Business Manager is a place for every professional and entrepreneur on Facebook. Whether you run advertisements for hundreds of thousands or just have a Facebook page with funny memes that you use for paid cooperation, losing access to it would be just awful.
Business Manager users have a little bit more privileges on Facebook compared to ordinary users, and they are treated like clients rather than users (after all, in the eyes of Facebook, activating Business Manager turns you into a business and therefore also an advertiser who just hasn’t started advertising yet).
- First, go to https://business.facebook.com and click “Create an Account”
- Then enter the required details. Note that Facebook considers every paid promotion a “business”, so you do not have to enter the name of your company or even have a company at all to use Business Manager
- By clicking on the appropriate button, add Facebook pages you manage to the new Business Manager.
- Click on the gear icon and add team members using the menu that is available in the settings (it’s worth having a second administrator, but more on that in a moment) – make sure to remember its location (https://business.facebook.com/settings/people?). This is going to be useful for the next steps.
Done, you’ve just set up a Business Manager, from which you can now manage your Facebook pages and ad accounts.
Using Business Manager will not only put you in a slightly more privileged position than other Facebook users but most of all it will allow you to easily grant access to other users and businesses. This is important from a technical point of view, and this is what my trick essentially is.
Now, even if you lose access to your Facebook account as a result of a permanent ban, you will still receive notifications about your business. And this is the gate that we will use to bypass the ban.
How to successfully bypass Facebook ban?
If your account was banned but you still want to communicate with your Facebook page fans, you need to access the page using another account that isn’t banned and has the same access level to your Business Manager.
To regain access to your Facebook page, follow the steps below:
- Provide your friend with the URL of your Facebook page using the Business Manager view.
- Let your friend send a request to administer your Facebook page from his Business Manager
- You will receive a request (also by e-mail) for your friend to get access to your banned account
- Despite the ban, you will be able to confirm it. Now access to your Facebook page is unlocked. All you need to do now is get to Business Manager of your friend to whom you have granted access.
- To do this, create a new Facebook account. Make sure this account has friends, a profile picture, and a credible name. You will use it while your ban lasts and in the future as a “backup account” for any potential unfortunate events of that kind
- Provide your friend with the e-mail address of your new account. Thanks to this, they will be able to send you an invitation to their Business Manager (they will add you as their new colleague). When you confirm the invitation, your friend will be able to give you administrative access to your Facebook page from the level of their Business Manager.
Of course, instead of using your friend’s Business Manager, you can quickly create a second one yourself by logging into the new “backup” account and follow all the steps above, confirming access on the old account and granting it to the new one.
The main thing to note is that the entire process requires the use of Business Manager.
Naturally, granting Business Manager access to a friend who has more than one Facebook page and multiple ad accounts will not draw as much attention as creating a fake account (Business Managers with an advertising history are simply more reliable for Facebook administration).
And we are done! Now you can describe the situation to your fans and tell them you will be communicating with them using the Facebook page only for the time being.
I also invite you to read this text about a community that steals Facebook groups. After I posted this entry, they made an unsuccessful attempt to hack my page and even threaten me. The charges were pressed against them and the text itself is not going to be removed from the blog.
Such a response to an educational entry about Facebook security only proves how social media security content is not only not obvious but also very much underrated and not discussed enough.
