As many of you may have noticed, I was pumping around from my FACEBOOK Account last week ..

Since I set up a Facebook account, I love using it! I find it is a great place for all networking opportunities. One day while trying to add another business associate who sent ‘friend requests’, I received FB’s notice that “You have exceeded your friend limit of 5,000 friends. The limit is 5000 friends. Your friend count must be below this number to add more friends.”

Unbelievable!! What?? Facebook has such unreasonable rule to tells you how many friends you can have? Limit to 5,000 friends, who picked it?

Well, after search around FB’s ‘Help’ section, there is nothing I can do, it is FB rule.

Fine, after that, I followed other users’ advice and opened a “Fan Page”, which allows you to have an unlimited number of fans.

I thought have a fan page is great, without losing all my friends that in my FB Profile page, now I can ‘transfer’ them to my Fun page, huh!

Unfortunately, it is nothing like what I thought, there’s no way to delete the Profile page. AND there’s really no way to tell all your “friends” to come and join you on your Fan Page.

Even I posted it to my wall and try to get the word out. But no one really knows which page to go to if they’re a friend of both. It is very confusing!

(P.S: If anyone knows how to disable your Profile page, but keep your Fan page and transfer the people on your profile page over to your Fan page, in the other words, just have one facebook page, please share it in the comment area below this post … thank you!)

On the other hand, each day, when I log into my old profile page, I saw there are so many new friend requests are waiting for me to confirm. You know guys – I would love to have you on board, but the only problem I have was I had no room to add them (unless someone unfriendly to me and remove their own account from my friend’s list or whatever).

Instead of just ignoring those new friend’s requests and saw they sit there, it will be polite if I send a message to each one of them to explain something like the following:

Hey! Thanks for the friend request. I would love to have you on my friend’s list, unfortunately, the number of friends in my account is reached to Facebook’s max limit and I’m not able to add more than 5,000 friends to this page ..

So if you don’t mind, please join me on my “Fan” page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ann-Liu/95513323030?pub=2309869772&ref=s. Thanks for your support!

Sincerely
Ann Liu

So I started send out a couple dozen of these messages, and then I saw a red waring box pop up, it was a waring message from facebook that I were “engaging in behavior that other Facebook user’s may find annoying, please read our ‘terms of use” … otherwise we would disable your account”!

What?? Replying to a request is annoying? I wasn’t spamming anyone! I was replying to people who had sent me a MESSAGE. Is it really funny? Soon, I learned that if you only send a few message every couple of hours it seemed to be okay, and the warnings message will not come through, whatever, it is quite frustrating. So to avoid account got disabled, I have to stop reply those friends’ requests and send them message.

Now, I have two pages (confusing) and I still have no idea how many people I can respond to in my inbox in order to avoid FB’s warning message about “annoying” .. !!

Here is the lesson I learned from my own experience:

Over the next couple of years, if you ever hope to connect with more than 5,000 people, you definitely want to make sure you have set your profile up as a “Fan” Page instead as a profile page, especially for those that in the business, who are enjoying networking, find passion in connecting and sharing information with others. And use social network marketing as a tool to promote your products or services etc.

So now on the Facebook, the only place we can be friends is my Fan page link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ann-Liu/95513323030?pub=2309869772&ref=s

To NOT get your account disabled by Facebook, the most important things to remember is to Follow FB’s rules and be Polite.