This morning finds me mildly pissed off. I use Facebook to advertise this blog and my book 5 Tales. I use the “boost” feature for both posts and to gather “likes” for my author page. I’m not really sure how effective this marketing program is thus far, but I see the utility in it. For a relatively small amount of money you do get some decent exposure for your stuff. Bringing traffic to your product in any business is the key to getting more sales and Facebook certainly can bring those numbers.

However, I’m already seeing a problem in how they are vetting their ads. At this point, I have had three posts rejected for two reasons. The first was for using “profanity” in my post title. This was the title: “You Bet Your Ass Dickens Would Have Rocked this Age!” It was designed to draw attention to this blog post on The Writer’s Lair. It was rejected for the use of the word “ass”. “Ass” is a pretty benign word, so I was kind of put off by the rejection. I changed the post by not putting in a title and just used the link to the blog without any description. That went through, but I lost my oomph factor on the posting.

Yesterday, I did a blog post entitled “Vampire – Porn”, which you can find here. The content of the article had nothing to do with actual porn. However, I was rejected for – get this: promoting adult toys and/or services. So, I re-posted the article without title again and was still rejected. This pissed me off as I really wanted to boost this particular post because the subject, vampires in literature, is always a hot one and I knew it would draw traffic to the blog.

If Facebook is going to be in the advertising business they need to find a better way to vet ads. I realize they are bigger than the universe and all, but they’re going to lose a lot of $ through this very topical method of scanning and prematurely rejecting material. Glad I sold that stock.