Facebook is regarded as social media’s top dog throughout the world. In just over 10 years the website has led the way for an entirely new social experience, encompassing more than 1 billion users. In the last few years, Facebook’s reach has branched into advertising and marketing. This merging of our social lives and businesses has solidified Facebook as one of the most effective marketing tools on the planet.
You probably have an understanding of the above, if not intimately, then at least in a vague way. As with all emerging commercial activities, there are plenty of tricks to make the system work for you. Facebook is no different in this regard, but the website has done its best to make these tricks very difficult.
The main method for bulk users is to have multiple personal accounts and multiple unconnected business pages, all of which help to boost attention and therefore revenue.
Why is Unblocking Important?
This has nothing to do with unblocking a blocked “friend” via Facebook. If that’s your concern, Facebook itself has a very easy solution. Give that friend a second chance, won’t you?
Unblocking in this context has to do with Facebook’s desire to keep you and your multiple accounts off the website. It’s also about individual users who want to access Facebook but are located in areas where it’s not accessible or people who want multiple personal accounts for private reasons.
In both cases, proxies are the best tool to get around these measures, but you have to do it carefully.
Facebook has invested a huge number of resources to keep the site free of spam accounts, fake people and phony businesses. The reality is that some of you reading this will be looking to unblock Facebook so you can do exactly these things. Other people will have legitimate needs and still find that Facebook blocks you.
The methods I list below will work in both cases, and I’ll split them into two separate groups:
- Bulk account users. These users will be looking to create multiple Facebook accounts because they have many businesses or want to promote multiple projects through legitimate and illegitimate actions.
- Individual users. Some of you just want to access Facebook on your own without getting blocked. I get it. This will help you out.
The Warning
As you can probably already guess, the methods below allow for a lot of spam accounts to be generated. This is not recommended, and Facebook will be quite upset if it finds out you’ve tried to bypass their security features. This will result in banned accounts, banned IP addresses, and a larger hill to climb.
Carry on as you will, but be conscious of the social network of people you’re affecting with your actions.
Unblocking Facebook for Bulk Accounts
The most common legitimate scenario for bulk accounts is a business that manages client’s Facebook accounts, and therefore needs to access hundreds in a single day.
This will require smooth and unfettered access to Facebook, and if a block gets thrown up every few minutes or hours, the business simply won’t succeed. Likewise, an individual may need to create a dozen or so accounts because they have many businesses.
In either case, you’ll want to use a combination of proxies and software or web-based managers to get your work done quickly and seamlessly.
Facebook Proxies
For many people, proxies will be the backbone of managing multiple Facebook pages. A proxy is a unique IP address that is different from your ISP provided IP address.
Using proxies for Facebook accounts will assure that multiple accounts are not cross-linked by Facebook in a negative way, which will reduce your blocks.
However, navigating the proxy world is not necessarily simple. There are a few steps to using proxies correctly for Facebook.
1. Proxy Type
Don’t use free proxies. Free proxies seem enticing and will theoretically keep your costs low, but they get banned often, have hundreds of other users, and will send up red flags for you on Facebook.
Instead, you’ll want to purchase elite private proxies. Yes, these will cost money, but you can consider it part of your business expense. Also, they’re not terribly expensive, depending on how many you need. I’m talking as low as $5 per month for a single proxy.
2. Proxy Location
One of the biggest aspects of getting Facebook blocks on individual accounts is how Facebook views your activity. If you access an account from many locations, it becomes suspicious. Inversely, if you access a ton of accounts from a single location, it also becomes suspicious.
This goes back to the ultimate principle of proxies and internet usage: Companies want humans to use their services.
If one account is accessed by 20 locations in a single day, it doesn’t look like a human. Did you travel to 10 states and 10 countries in one day, and log into Facebook each time? I didn’t think so.
Likewise, if you have 200 Facebook accounts that are all logged in from the same IP address, it looks like a single human is running an entire Facebook Page business, which Facebook may identify as a spammer.
The second example can certainly be legitimate, and therefore has more wrinkles that I’ll get into later. For now, think about how Facebook activities look from a human or bot perspective, and you’ll start to catch on.
Proxy location matters for this. When purchasing a proxy you can often ask your provider where the IP will be located physically. You’ll want IPs that are in the same general physical location as where the account was created. If you don’t get this, you’ll be asked to verify the account when you use your new IPs.
After that first verification, you should be OK, as long as you use the same proxy every time, which leads me to the next step.
3. Assigning Proxies
Assigning proxies falls right on the heels of proxy location. In general, you’ll want to assign specific proxies to specific Facebook accounts. Let’s say you have 20 Facebook accounts to manage. In the ideal world, you’ll want to grab an individual private proxy for each account —
You have to do more than just use a proxy every time for an account; you have to use the same proxy for the same account. Link them together in a spreadsheet for manual reference, or program your software platform (more on that below) to always use the same proxy IP address for the same Facebook account.
This consistency is the most human-like because it shows Facebook you’re accessing that account from the same place every time.
That said, you don’t need one proxy for every account. Usually, 2-3 accounts per proxy is fine, because that’s about the number of Pages and Personal accounts a normal human has.
Facebook Managing Software
This topic could be an article all by itself, so I won’t get into huge amounts of depth here. Just know that for the business savvy person who has decided to manage large batches of Facebook accounts for clients, you’ll want to get the software. Managing the accounts manually is a serious time-suck.
You could use something like Hootsuite to manage your Facebook accounts (and other social media services), but it doesn’t have an option to connect via separate proxies. This means all of your activity will be through one IP address, which just won’t cut it for some people.
Three of the best services for this are Jarvee, Socinator, and Sociota. The first two are software applications you’ll download to your computer.
They only run on Windows and have a number of simple and complex tools to help you grow your Facebook interactions on unlimited accounts.
Sociota is a web-based browser that does something similar, and aims to compete with Hootsuite, but is much more advanced.
Each of these programs is used by white and black hat social media marketers. I can’t tell you what to do (obviously), but note that each service is meant for legal use only.
Facebook Tactics
Beyond using proxies and software managers, the best way to keep Facebook from blocking you is to be smart about the actual networking you’re doing. This again relies on the human vs. bot mentality.
The Bad Spammer
Here’s a good scenario. A typical spammer with no real knowledge of Facebook will create twenty accounts in an hour, create 5 business Pages run from each account, log onto all of them from a single IP, and start posting automatically with a bot program.
Each of those 5 Pages per account will focus on a single niche, and they’ll tag and link each of their Pages to the others so that the social “reach” of each Page rises. They’ll like 1,000 other pages in the first twenty minutes of account creation, post on people’s walls, send out friend requests, etc.
Essentially, they’ll blast a message loud and clear to Facebook: “I am here to spam!”
Facebook will respond with a quick kick in the face (get it?) and ban the IP address first, then every account that is connected to it. The typical, non-educated spammer will weep (or just pop another Monster), and then search the internet for an article like this.
What You Should Do
Everything above is a “don’t do” in the realm of Facebook. I’ll assume you’ve grabbed private proxies and know how to assign your IP addresses to your accounts. The biggest component to consider after those two musts is how you use Facebook itself.
It’s a social networking tool, not a spamming tool.
If you want Facebook to believe you’re using its services legitimately, try using them legitimately. Crazy concept, right? With management software you will have the ability to like posts and pages, comment on walls and pictures, and post your own content. This is what a real person running a business Page would do, so you should do it too.
The key is to not do it too fast, or too concentrated. Don’t like 1,000 new pages in ten minutes, do it in 4-7 days. You can set your management software to do the liking for you, just remember to set the rate limit to a slow amount. This way Facebook will think it’s a real person liking pages to grow their business.
The second biggest folly in the above scenario is connecting your pages to each other through likes, tags, and promotion. Don’t do that. It’s painfully obvious to Facebook (and everyone in your niche) when you own multiple Pages that try to boost each other.
This is especially true when you create the accounts in the same day or week. If you’re serious about this, stagger your account creation to further reduce the connections each Page has to the other.
If you have separate IP addresses, accounts created at separate times, and normal human-speed behavior, there’s no reason Facebook will block you.
Unblocking Facebook for Everyone
The above is specifically geared towards bulk Facebook account managers, but I know individuals can get blocked as well. Many of the same principles apply, especially using an IP address that is in the same area as your ISP IP address.
If you’re trying to access Facebook at school or work and it’s blocked, a proxy will most definitely allow you to log in. You might have to verify your account via email or phone, but that shouldn’t be an issue because it’s just a single account, and you’ll probably have your phone on you.
The other solution that works is simply heading to a website that helps to unblock Facebook for you. While I don’t totally recommend these sites because they are usually free — which means they’ll scrape your data, ask for an email address, or somehow make you less protected — in a pinch, they will work.
Facebook blocks will take some time and money to get around, but it’s nothing you can’t handle. I have faith in your abilities. Just try to keep it business-focused, because multiple Facebook pages on the social network is a monster time suck.
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