Social Media Best Practices: Play by Facebook’s rules

In our eighth installment of Social Media Best Practices, we discuss the importance of abiding by Facebook’s rules when conducting an ad campaign. If you missed Best Practice #7: “Practice good link hygiene,” click here.

Facebook has lots of rules, and they are constantly changing. You are most likely to learn about them when one of your ads is rejected. If you plan on running regular ads, check out Facebook’s training modules called Facebook Blueprint. These modules include up-to-date, comprehensive training and certification. Certification is not required to run Facebook ads, but will help avoid some risks of trial and error.

At the very least, make sure to spend time with Facebook’s ad policies here: https://business.facebook.com/policies/ads. A few important policies are worth highlighting:

Ads must not contain content that asserts or implies personal attributes. This includes direct or indirect assertions or implications about a person’s race, ethnic origin, religion, beliefs, age, sexual orientation or practices, gender identity, disability, medical condition (including physical or mental health), financial status, membership in a trade union, criminal record or name.

Ads must not contain content that exploits crises or controversial political or social issues for commercial purposes.
In practice, this means it’s best to avoid “negative” words, phrases, and keywords like ‘death,’ ‘sick’ and ‘disgusting’.

It’s important to follow Facebook’s policies to the best of your ability to avoid pilling up rejected ads. Too many rejected ads may lead Facebook to disable your entire ad account or business, which is a more complicated issue to resolve. It is recommended to “Request a Review” of any rejected ad that you feel was mis-flagged by the algorithm. Every rejected ad has an opportunity to be reviewed by a human working for Facebook, who often overturns the rejection.