Get Answers: Meta Violations, Spam DMs, and Sharing Assets

Episode Overview

This monthly edition of the podcast is all about answering YOUR questions on digital marketing and craft beer. 

This month, we're talking about: 

• Meta/Facebook account violations and how to get out of them

• Spam Messages within Meta Manager

• Best practices for sharing marketing assets

Want to get your questions answered next month? Shoot us an email at podcast@gethoptimized.com. 


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Intro/Outro Music by ComaStudio from Pixabay 

Episode Transcript

(AI-Generated, please forgive any typos)

What's up, welcome to the get optimized podcast. This is Chris, your host. And this is a show all about craft beer and marketing growth and all that fun stuff, all the stuff that's supposed to help you grow your business, make more money, live the good life. I don't know if the show's about living the good life, but we are going to talk about marketing.

And, uh, this is the get answers edition of the podcast where we are. Taking a look at questions that have come in to us from various different sources, asking about stuff, anything ranging from tactics to support to, um, file management, all those different things as it relates to digital marketing, right?

So if you want, by the way, if you want to get your question answered, uh, drop us a line. You can do that on our website. Just go to getoptimized. com. Look for the. The Get Answers Podcast menu option, you'll see a little form there. Also, if you're a member of the Craft Beer Marketing Facebook group, or the Craft Beer Professionals group, we have a post out there too, occasionally.

Um, but yeah, so anyways, we're here to answer your questions, right? And this week We've got a few for you. Um, a couple of things related to meta, the meta universe here. Uh, got a few things about like account violations, spam messages. That'll be fun to get into. Uh, and then we got some more questions about file management and sharing assets and that kind of stuff.

So I'm excited to get into that stuff with you and, uh, let's just, let's just do it. So with, uh, the first question here, the question is about a meta Facebook account violations. And how you get out of those violations. Okay. This is a, this is for sure a pain point. We see this stuff all the time. Many times when we bring on a new account, not many times, I'd say probably like it's more often than you think, right?

Like, um, gosh, maybe, maybe 15, 20 percent of the time we, we start working with a new account and there is an issue with it. And the violation has caused problems. Uh, Especially ones that have gone unchecked and unfixed, you can get like a permanent restriction on your account that blocks you from running ads, it blocks you from sharing access to the page, it basically like, this is a very weird thing from my perspective for Meta, they will, they'll call you permanently, permanently restricted, they will allow you to continue to post stuff, but they will block you from doing everything else on the, on the platform.

Anything related to business stuff and it's very bad if that happens if you have a a like a permanent restriction due to a violation You are screwed dude. That is it That's a really hard one to get around because you can't get your Facebook page pulled out of a business manager It's one of the problems with it.

You can't pull your Instagram away from it. You can't do so many things And if you ever try to sell your business, try to add managers, do any of that stuff, you're going to be in pain. We were just dealing with some of this this week. Actually, we found a way around it and we had to like create a whole new Facebook account on Instagram.

And it sucks when that happens because you know, you put a lot of time and effort into growing that following and these violations happen and sometimes the violations are kind of bogus, but. Uh, sometimes not, you know, most of the time you're seeing a violation, uh, in the craft beer world, we see violations for, for two things most commonly, commonly age.

So you've been running ads where you have been running to 18 year olds because the default is like 18 plus inside of the ads manager. And if you do that once, okay, it's whatever, do it twice, okay, whatever. But you start having this happen to repeat times and you're just not paying attention. What Meta looks at, the way they look at that is like you are trying to circumvent systems and circumvent systems is something they do not like.

They do not like their systems being circumvented. So, you do not want to make that mistake, even though it's a simple mistake, you don't want to make it multiple times. And you especially don't want to make that mistake without correcting the issue. So, and this is a common theme here. Um. But I'll get in that in a second.

So the age is a common one. The other one is copyright. So if you're using like a third party editor to create your videos and you're putting music in there and you are not selecting music that is copyright free, right? It's a unlicensed, free to use. Uh, and I don't mean you got it for free. I mean, it doesn't have a copyright stuff and you know, you want to have the cool videos, right?

You want to have the trending audio and you want to have the artists that are recognizable, but here's the thing. You're a business. And because you're a business and you're using that content, even if you aren't running an ad with it, you're using that content to sell stuff and that is bad and you can't use trademarked copyright stuff to do that.

And really meta gets sued. So if meta gets sued, they don't want you doing it. So, uh, they definitely will flag you for that. And that's a common one, right? So just use the, use the license free music. Um, to get around that, you can find that stuff on the YouTube audio library. If you're using Canva pro, you can select, uh, their whole library is license free.

If you're on CapCut, just use a, there's like a whole filter for copyright. Use that, uh, there's tools out there that help you check it. But again, this sort of kind of bring it back to what I was saying earlier, these repeat violations are not good. So that that's really what trips at one violation. Not bad, but you keep doing this.

Not good. Other stuff is like really bad, right? Like if you get flagged for racism or violence or, um, what else is a bad one? Um, I mean, hate speech is kind of that, that racism bucket. You do that kind of stuff and Facebook doesn't like it. Meta doesn't like it. You'll get flagged and you can have your content pulled down.

And again, like it's about repeat. And this is bringing me to something else I was talking about a second ago. If you see these violations, you have got to react quickly. Don't let them sit. Because another thing that happens with this is if you have a violation, sometimes they'll say, look, fix it. And you're cool.

If you don't go fix it. And they put a timeline on it. They say, fix it. You're cool. You got 30 days, go fix it. And all you have to do is delete the ad account or change the ad, the age, or get rid of the content that had the copyright stuff on it. And you fix it. And as long as you do that, you're cool. If you don't, if you don't do that and you let the violation lapse into the time frame they put on it, you're S.

O. L. They are going to be like out skis. Not good. So I'm telling you all this stuff because the best way to get out of violations is to not get in them in the first place. And if you do go appeal, if you, okay, so let's, let's break the sound. If you, if you do get a violation, go, okay. Respond, fix whatever it is and they want to fix if you don't think that it's a fair violation.

Sometimes this happens right? Like with alcohol, if you're promoting, sometimes they'll flag you and they'll say you're trying to sell alcohol and you're like, no, I'm not. I'm a brewery. I mean, yeah, I'm trying to sell alcohol, but like what they mean by that is they think the robot that checked the ad thinks that you, uh, that you are selling alcohol in e commerce style, you know, and that's not good in certain states.

So if that happens, you can appeal. Something like that. You're like, I'm not in violation. Appeal it. And what will happen, there's a button to appeal. You submit it. You give a reason like, hey, I'm cool. A human will then review it. And the human oftentimes will, sometimes this happens really fast. They're like, oh, yeah, within a matter of hours, your stuff is fixed.

You know, so the appeal process works. And where you find this stuff is like usually is within ads, but sometimes your content, you'll see a red flag, something, you'll see a notification. There's a link somewhere going to check, but you can always go check by looking at your, um, your business, uh, support section of meta.

And you can find this by, you can go to the URL. You can bookmark it. It's facebook. com slash business dash support dash home. Or if you are familiar with like where to use your settings, like your, or where to find your settings, like you hit that little three line hamburger menu inside of Facebook and you go in and you open up like all settings, all tools, and that's where you go to your ads manager, your content manager, all that stuff.

There's one in there that is, um, your, your business support home. This is a relatively recent feature, at least recent in the time that we're recording this podcast. Um, that they have done it used to be account quality, you could go and find account quality and you could google search at facebook account quality, but all those links now redirect to business support home and in the business support home dashboard, you can see your status on everything.

And, uh, that is a really, really good tool, um, for any kind of violations you have. That's also where you see any history. If you've had any support there, it's a good spot to check. Um, now, uh, the last thing I will say on this is, uh, oh, oh, yeah, this is what I was going to say, checking my notes. Um, what you can also do if you have a question about something is you have access to a chat if you have a business page.

And if you've run any ads at all, even if you have an ad account, I think they give you this access. You can go to facebook. com slash business slash help and on that page if you scroll down a little bit There is a button that's like contact support If you click that it will probably redirect to your business support home And from there if you scroll down you keep scrolling there's a spot to say I need more help It's something else and you start clicking through there and you keep going through and there's a lot of options They have a lot of like Robot answers to stuff where it's like, Oh, yeah, you know, I'm trying to get access to this.

I'll try to give you a help article or whatever. And some of that stuff is helpful. But if you really want to chat to a human, you can do it. You just have to keep scrolling to the bottom, keep going to the spots that say it's something else. It's something else. It's something else. And, uh, you will eventually get into a chat queue inside of Meta Messenger and they will chat with you.

And you can ask some questions and it doesn't have to be advertising related. You can say. Hey, I got this issue, help me out and they should be able to help you as long as you have permission and access to the page and all that stuff. So anyways, a bit of a long winded answer here for the violations thing, but it's super important.

We see this issue happen all the time and I would love for you to avoid it because man, it is bad news if you get violated and you can't, if you get violated, that sounded weird. If you get violated, that's bad news as well. But if your account gets a violation that you don't clear up, that is especially not good.

Okay, moving on. We got another meta one. So something else that's been going on a lot lately I've filled in multiple questions people hit me up and they're like I'm getting hit with these spam messages inside of my meta manager like crazy and I get them too I see him inside of our client accounts and they're like Really spammy sketch but but kind of in like this clever way They look like it's meta support messaging you and like your account is in violation.

You need to fix it. Click here or Something along those lines, right? And, uh, I'm not talking about the spam messages of like, you know, you know the, there's all sorts of stuff on Instagram and stuff like these direct messages from somebody who's trying to like get your phone number or whatever. You know, maybe selling you, you know, adult services.

All this kind of weird stuff you see on Instagram. But, uh, what I'm talking about is the ones that look like MetaSupport. And these are super sketched because they're using the logo, they're using a name that's something like Meta Support Center or something like that. You've probably seen these things.

And they're not real. This is not real. Meta does not message you that way. You use Meta Messenger to chat with support if you go to use that chat thing, but only if you instigate it. And you'll be able to tell. It is a very different scenario. Um, these folks are not Meta Support. And this is baffling to me because Literally, if you click on their profile, this is the, this is, this is trick number one, click on their profile, go to their profile page.

They probably have like one follower and, uh, it looks sketch is crap is is the no pose, no, nothing. You can tell that this is a sketch profile. And what, what baffles me about this is like, how do you not have a rule that is support? Like you only have one support channel as a company, right? Like you have the one that everyone chats you with you with, you know, what it is because you make it just make a rule inside of your code that says anybody who creates anything that has anything even close to this name, delete it on, on premise.

But they let these people in and they let, it's like, how do you, how do you even exist? Where is the fix? It's easy fix, at least to me. Granted, I'm not, it's probably way above my pay grade. Zuckerberg, if you're listening, please explain to us why the hell this is a thing. Anyways, so if you get these spam messages, and you're like, is this legit?

99 out of 100 times it is not. 999 out of a thousand times. Probably even worse odds it is. Not legit, because Meta never messages you. They'll email you and, uh, you'll see that because you'll get an email if you have a account violation or something like that. And sometimes email is weird because you're like, oh, is anybody emailing me?

Sometimes there are emails from spam people. So you gotta look for the stuff that looks weird. You'll see like a weird capitalization in the signature. You'll see dots where they shouldn't be. Don't click on anything in any scenario. If you are even remotely Worried and you should be worried about anything that comes your way.

Uh, so that's everything. What you should do is you should go look at your business support status. Cause if somebody spam message you and saying you're in violation, go to that URL I talked about a second ago, facebook. com slash business dash support dash home, or go through, you know, your go to Facebook, get into your, your business profile.

Find the all tools and then find the business support in there. You'll see if you are violated. So if you're violated, I keep saying that You'll see if you have a violation and this is what happens when clients hit me up. It's like I'm getting these spam messages What's wrong? And it's like there's nothing wrong.

I checked your support home. You're good. So, uh, that is a way to check it You could also use the the facebook. com Business help find the chat As mentioned a second ago, you can go ask them about it if there's any, any issues, no matter what, like I, I recommend you should report these messages. It is good meta.

I, I, I want to believe I have hope that any free every time I report these things, I'm helping them like, yo, this stuff is crap report, report, report so that Facebook figures this out. Hopefully someday that these things are crap report, block the account. And move on from it. But, uh, you know, another question is kind of related to this is that they're happening a lot, what's going on.

And they come in waves like a month ago, it was like every single day, there was one account that we managed. It was getting like every few minutes they were getting paint hard with these spam messages. And I think what the spammers did is they somehow figured out how to embed some kind of messenger code on a website and their website was running like programming to.

Just spam the message over and over and over they were probably doing this to hundreds of business accounts And it's crazy these folks how they get into this. So it was happening a month ago I haven't seen a whole lot of it lately But we'll probably get more waves of it in the future. It comes in waves I don't know what the deal is with the scammers, but they they operate in a wave Function.

Okay, let's move on one more question to get to and it's about What is everybody using to manage their assets? Especially when it comes to sharing with distributors, outside parties, etc. So, uh, the reason I wanted to talk about this one is because we, we, we kind of talked about this last time, right? Where we, we talked about like file storage and asset storage.

And we said Google Drive was the most popular when we pulled everybody, but I wanted to bring this up because. Uh, specifically because this person asked about sharing with people, and I want to do elaborate because I think this is big on this, our team, we try to be as organized as we possibly can inside of our Google drive.

We use Google drive and there's some things I want to share with that because we are actively involved in sharing stuff with printers, with distributors, with artists, with, you know, all sorts of people, even within our own team, we have multiple designers, we have project managers. That are dealing with this stuff.

So I think there's a couple of things I can say about sharing and how, how to make that helpful and beneficial for everybody. So, uh, first and foremost, cloud storage, that's huge. And if you're a regular listener to the podcast, I don't want to beat a dead horse cause you just heard about this, but cloud storage, super, super important.

That makes it easy for everyone. It makes it easy for you. It's safe for secure. You don't have it all in one place. You can access it anywhere, et cetera, et cetera. It's very good. Now. When it comes to sharing this stuff, you want to do a few things. I would have a folder that has all your, your brand stuff in it.

So you want to have one folder that's, uh, got your font. It's got your logo. It's got multiple versions of your logo. You should have a, like a, a PNG version with a transparent background. You should have one that has a light background, dark background. You should have one that's, uh, 300 DPI or better or higher, which is good for print.

You should have one that is like a, um, it, it, 72 DPI is typically good for screens. Lately though, I've been using 150 because of like how good these screens are getting. You know, like these 4K devices and stuff. You know, a 72 DPI can look a little fuzzy sometimes. So, 150 is still a little heavier. So, DPI, for those that don't know, DPI means dots per inch.

And it really it's like pixels per inch, right? Like you're, you're, it's, it's, it's like the, um, the thickness of the graphic of the logo or whatever. The more dots you have, when you have a screen that has more dots, like four K's, you know, has a lot of dots in there. Um, then it, those dots get spread out and it looks a little fuzzy.

Uh, that's why print print is like way high, 300 plus. So when you take a screen version of the logo, like 72 DPI, a web version or something like that, and you put it on a printed asset, that's what asset, and it looks fuzzy, that's why it looks fuzzy, it's because it's not high enough DPI. So back to the, the file storage stuff, you want to have versions of your logo that are both so that you can easily share this stuff out.

Or you say, here's my logo folder with all this stuff in it. Um, I would keep a, a. Version of those logos and stuff in cold storage, because when you share this stuff, a lot of times it's just super easy to say, yeah, share, approve all access, whatever, because like sometimes people can't download from them, depending on if you're Dropbox or whatever, Google drive has this issue where sometimes people can't get an access stuff as they need.

So you just need to maximize permissions with the share link. But when you do that, I'd be scared because I'm like, well, if somebody like to accidentally deletes my logo out of there, uh, you know, I wouldn't put it past people. So I would keep a version of it in cold storage. And I mean, like that means like on a device, but I caution against that stuff too, because once you have two versions of something out there, there's potential for those things not to be the same.

Right. And that's, that is, uh, where my next point comes into play is that you want to have a version of your brand guidelines in this. Shared environment, so that when you share this stuff, your logo, your fonts, anything where somebody's working on your brand, you gotta have brand control. And you want people to do things the right way, which means the right colors, the right style.

And if you look at like, big brands, you know, companies that have, have invested a lot of time and effort into their brand, their brand guidelines are extremely strict, strict. I mean, down to like, you shouldn't Tilt the logo, it has to be this direction, this color scheme, it's, it's like very, very controlled.

And it's because their brand is very important to them. I'm not saying you need to get that intense, right? But, um, if you care about your brand and you have someone designing labels for you, posters, whatever, have a brand guidelines document. And that brand guidelines document is going to be basically a set of rules for how to use your brand, what fonts to use, where.

What colors to use your color palettes, a huge portion of that. What really helps these designers and stuff is a color palette. Cause on that color palette, you should have hex codes. If you've done Pantone, you can have your Pantone numbers on there, uh, which is super important for folks that are doing print or merchandise.

Um, uh, but anyways, your brand guideline document helps with this. Also when you're sharing stuff, man, this is a, this is a. Public service announcement here is, name your files, please, please, for the love of all that is good in this world, name your files, because when you share that massive folder of photos, and they're all DC184000, it is a pain in the butt, and I get it, it's hard, it's a lot of stuff that you gotta go through, and if you have a massive number of photos that you're disuploading, You know and you're sharing that like probably do some grooming You don't share everything because like what if somebody posts a photo or use a photo that you don't like it isn't really suited for marketing So you got to do a little of your own homework and say look Here's the real stuff and that big bucket of photos or whatever is gonna shrink down And in that shrink down process name them even a little bit and like if it's beer Name the type of beer or at least say dark beer, light beer, clear beer.

This kind of stuff because man, dude, anybody you're working with outside of your environment, I'm telling you, if you are working with a printer, a artist, someone doing labels for you, packaging for you, they look at thousands of files in a month, sometimes in a week and they don't know what your stuff is.

So help them name your name, your to have a system, have some nomenclature system inside of your file and inside of your, your folders, which will be massively. Um, what else can I tell you about sharing, uh, stuff? Um, again, I think the cloud storage is just super huge. Um, nomenclature. I said that, uh, brand guidelines.

I said that, um, Hmm. Gosh, there's one other thing. It's like itching on the literally on the side of my brain. I'm going to, I'm going to remember it as soon as we stop recording the podcast. And, uh, cause we do stuff, you know, we'll send stuff to. Printing folks. Oh, this is what I was going to say. I remembered it.

Layered files. This is good to have around too. Uh, for a lot of reasons. So, what layered means, at least I think it means this. I'm sure that some designer is going to listen to this and be like, actually, what we're talking about is something else. But, from my, from my perspective, what I mean by layered, when I ask for this from my designers or when we send stuff to print, or whatever, is that this is a editable or somewhat editable file.

That has literally like the way the file is structured when you open it up instead of Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator Is that the elements in the work working document are like different layers? So there's like if you have a beer label, for example, you have like a layer for your logo on there You have a layer for the background you have a layer for everything in between from all the little artist stuff the drawings the Nutrition facts the barcode all that stuff can be on different layers And that layered version allows somebody to do stuff with it.

So if you, you probably know if you've ever sent anything to print and you're doing metallic or any kind of like special effect on the print for the label, you need a special layer for that. Um, if like, for example, what we do sometimes for, uh, beer release graphics is we'll get a layered, um, label.

Artwork and we'll, we'll pull out the background out of that and use that background is like the background for the video. It's really cool. It makes a really nice effect, but you need the layered file. So another thing to do when you're having these, these, uh, inside of your cloud storage system is another layer of file type is layered.

Keep that around for anything you do. I mean, some stuff you're not going to need that. You're gonna have a layered version of a photo, right? But if you have your labels in there, get the layered versions. If you have your logo, there might be a layered version of that. Um, posters and stuff like that, you might have layered versions.

Some of that you're not going to need because you're not going to edit that stuff. Uh, but, um, you know, definitely labels, definitely packaging. That kind of stuff is going to be helpful for, uh, for you and everybody you work with. Okay, I think we got it. Um, got a few more updates for you before I let you go.

Uh, first, you got to catch me at the CBP Spring Virtual Conference this March. March 25th through 27th. That's the Craft Beer Professionals Spring Virtual Conference. I am doing a presentation on, I just had this up, it's called, uh, Three High Octane Marketing Campaigns to Fill Your Brewery's Growth. So what we're going to be doing in that is we're kind of cracking open our playbook and literally going to show you the framework behind three campaign types that we're running.

For breweries right now that are improving results that are increasing sales and all that good stuff Literally some some good stuff as it relates to tap room foot traffic Distribution those kind of things gonna show you exactly how we do it and that is going to be part of the craft beer professionals Spring virtual conference this March.

What else we got? I'm also going to be speaking at the craft craft brewers conference CBC in Vegas this April I'm really excited about that. We're doing a presentation on multi channel marketing. And man, this I've, I've gotten most of the presentation done at this point. And it is a beast in, in the best way.

Bring your coffee, bring your notepad and a, uh, and some energy because there's going to be a lot we cover there and it's going to be super awesome. Especially for anybody who's like sick of the meta stuff and you're trying to diversify your marketing portfolio. Definitely a tent. Okay. That's some upcoming stuff.

If, uh, you know, you're listening to this and you go, I have a question, please don't wait, just send us a message right now. You can send it to podcast at get optimized. com. You can go to get optimized. com and look for the get answer section of the website, drop us a line there, or go to our socials, DMS, whatever.

We'll catch it and, uh, make sure we, we add it to our list for next time. And, um, you know, share this episode of you, you got some value from it. Do us a favor, share it with somebody. Um, for now, I'm gonna, I'm gonna drink some of my homebrew. Yeah, I made a homebrew. I, uh, finally got around to doing it. I've been so busy I haven't, uh, brewed something.

But I brewed it. It came out great. It's a Fest beer. It came out great. It tastes fantastic. I don't think I got enough yield out of it. In my, in my mash and my boil process. And also I think I under yeasted it. If I could use that term. Um, I'm still a rookie with this stuff. You know, I've been brewing for a little while, but uh, a few years I still suck.

But it tastes fantastic, you know, and that's, that's all I could ask for. So, all right, I'm going to let you go. Enjoy your rest of your day, your morning, whatever. Thanks for stopping by. We will catch you next time. See ya.