Do not scrape custom audiences! (warning)

[K]

You may have heard but multiple affiliates are being taken to court and having to face legal battles due to Facebook taking action last week.

Scraping any type of audience is against Facebook TOS.

What this means is you can't use these bots or tools to scrape emails or ID's to create custom audiences to target.

Either build the list yourself or don't bother.

 

[Luke]

Interest targeting has a bigger reach anyway.

 

[K]

Interest targeting has a bigger reach anyway.

True, but more than often it has less interaction, less CTR and a bigger CPC.

 

[azgold]

K, you must've known that I was going to say that I have no idea what scraping custom audiences is because you explained it.

Seems an awful lot of people look for the short cuts, good business practices be damned.

 

[K]

The majority of people who are getting burned are those who "call out" the target in the copy - that's against TOS.

For example if you scraped 10000's of "Alex" names and called them out like, "Get this Alex t-shirt"

I think CA's are still fine along as its not ruthless.

 

[SayMyName]

Is it still ok to use custom audiences?

 

[EymardSiojo]

What about the apps that gets tokens to control your facebook without you noticing?
I think they should do more work on cracking this..

Thanks for the info K.

 

[ljadschris]

Saymyname - We're seeing some guys with custom audiences getting hammered right now with some of them losing their entire accounts. Its gotten progressively worse in the past few weeks and Facebook has modified their TOS. (no name campaigns etc.) Proceed with caution.

 

[jamesr]

Much appreciate the information considering that I was about to buy Socialwrench for FB etc... What are your thoughts on that module(bot)? Would it be worth buying? I believe it could be used to build a white-hat following if done correctly?

Your thoughts are much appreciated!

James. The new guy.

 

[servandosilva]

Thanks for this info.
Also calling ages and similar are usually hard this days!

 

[K]

Update.

I've been using CA's the last few days and it's been fine.

I think the main thing that FB got pissed about was people calling out ages, names etc which is against ToS.

 

[Jay Wessman]

Update.

I've been using CA's the last few days and it's been fine.

I think the main thing that FB got pissed about was people calling out ages, names etc which is against ToS.

Technically any custom audience that comprises of 'scraped' users is against Facebooks TOS (so using tools like Facesniper etc). Importing your own list that you've built up yourself (ie. through email marketing) is fine though from what I understand.

That being said it's probably hard for Facebook to pick you up on scraping unless you are doing it on a massive scale or are calling out names, ages etc as mentioned earlier in the thread.