I’ve seen a plethora of individuals popping up recently claiming to be an “expert” on how to use Facebook for business. Doesn’t bother me one bit, but what does is that these Facebook “experts” end up being cheerleaders of a tool that locks people’s accounts if the person becomes too popular.

This is what happened to Robert Scoble about 2 months ago. Robert Scoble is an A-list tech blogger and he had over 4000 friends in Facebook. Then one day, Facebook closed his account with no warning.

When he tried to find out “What gives?” he was told that he was running a script which is against Facebook’s terms and conditions. His account was reinstated, but Scoble does less Facebooking these days.

The regularity of how often Facebook deletes people’s profiles due to popularity (and while NOT running a script) is quite alarming to me (Scoble details it here and here). Scoble also interviewed Nathan Stebeski Stobezki who recently who got kicked off Facebook for getting too many friend requests.

Nathan was getting 48 requests a week because people on his very popular fashion website went to Facebook to request his friendship. Listen to the 10 minute interview between Scoble and Nathan below.

[display_podcast]

This is alarming to me since I run events and I tell people to become my friend. Due to the Social Media Telesummit and the fact that some big name Internet marketers have joined Facebook recently (such as the Ezine Queen, Alex Mandossian, Travis Greenlee, Michael Port, etc), I’ve been getting around 25 friend requests a week through Facebook.

Just yesterday, I couldn’t login to my account for most of the day due to “site maintenance”. Which was odd since others (like my sisters) were both able to get into their accounts and we’re all on the same ip. In other words, we were all at home and when I tried to login to my Facebook account from my laptop sitting right beside my sister, I kept getting the “site maintenance” message. She was able to login to her account with no problems.

While I use it to connect with people, I no longer use Facebook to promote my brand or generate leads. I don’t want to put in all that energy into building my friends’ list and groups, only to have my account closed because I decide to send a message to my list of 1000 friends to announce the launch of something I’m doing.

That’s why I’m looking forward to seeing what WordPress will do with Buddypress. Buddypress is social networking plugin for WordPress. That means I can build my own friends list and start my own groups on this blog. In other words, I own the data and it will reside in my database.

So, beware. Use Facebook, but don’t send too many messages, don’t have too many friends and don’t tell people at large scale events that you attend to become your Facebook friend. Otherwise, you’ll be labeled a spammer. And beware of Facebook “experts” who just cheerlead about the tool. They really need to understand the underbelly of this tool and advise accordingly.