I'm all for rules, terms, conditions, guidelines, what have you, but if you pick and choose when they apply rather than have a blanket approach, well that is when I get a bit picky.
Once again, Facebook is doing my head in.
Now before you go screaming that it is a free service and I should just shut up, I'm talking about a paid section of the 'book. Boosting and advertising.
Recently I was asked to promote a Facebook competition for the
online maternity and breastfeeding store, Milk and Love. Coincidentally only a week or two earlier I had been looking at their store and drooling over the
waterfall cardigan, so I was all "YA HUH! I LOVE YOUR CARDIGANS! I'LL DO IT!".
The lovely Corryn, who had just given birth about two seconds earlier and is trying to run a business with a newborn permanently attached to her, kindly sent me my drooled-after cardi along with the image to promote with her target demographic for me to "boost" to. There was never going to be a blog post, or Instagram, orTweet, just one Facebook post with a paid boost (paid to Facebook).
Within minutes of putting it up, we hit a snag. I got notification that my boost had been rejected because:
"it violates Facebook's Ad
Guidelines by using profanity or addressing the age, gender, physical
condition, or sexual orientation of users on Facebook."
I am a potty mouth from way back. So what horrid profanity had I used? Boobs. BOOBS!
In the context that I said I was about to re-learn breastfeeding which sometimes means boobs everywhere and that I liked the idea of a stylish way to cover up until I got the hang of it again.
Seriously, it is nipples akimbo in those first few weeks for me!
Are you kidding me?! How is the word "boobs" a profanity when there are 1000+ pages on Facebook with boobs in the title? The counter stops at 1000, so for all I know there are hundreds of thousands. You can have a so-called profanity as your page name but not in the text of an ad?! What?!
Let's also see that the cover picture for all of the pages that come up on the front page of the search have more boob than you'll ever see breastfeeding, and the top result shows areola and a few show nipple through a sheer/wet top. But let's call the cops because I said boob and had three fully dressed women in a picture.
I resubmitted the ad, with the wording slightly changed (sans boobs) and the boost was rejected AGAIN, this time for having more than 20% of the space as text. They measure 20% VERY differently to any other company I've ever met, but that is a different story.
For the record, when I queried both rejections Facebook would only talk to me about the 20% and ignored my request for information on the rejection of the word "boobs". Thanks for that.
So I find myself in the awkward position of not being able to promote the post in the way I agreed I would for a company that I like, run by a woman who right now can't just drop everything to change a graphic. The more pressing issue of changing newborn nappies and feeding and trying to get a wink of sleep trumps all that.
Instead, I'll promote it here:
If you're in the market for some awesome maternity and breastfeeding threads from an Australian online store, head over to
Milk and Love (and enter the competition through their
Facebook page). When you're there you can also ask questions of Katie, a midwife and International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, or check out the blog posts and breastfeeding FAQs. Much more than just an online shop.
You go do that while I rage away at the way "boobs" are allowed on Facebook when they
are for perving at, but when I try to even use the word in a breastfeeding sense and PAY for it, I
get in trouble.
