Five things your business isn't allowed to do on Facebook (but probably is doing anyway).

1. Host giveaways on your page’s Wall.

“What’s your favorite dessert at our restaurant? Let us know in the comments, and you could win a free gift card!” You probably see these simple giveaways all the time on Facebook, usually hosted by small businesses trying to build a little more engagement and loyalty.

These contests are a great way to build audience — but they’re also a violation of Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines, implemented in November 2009.

Throughout the rules, Facebook makes it clear that you can only run a contest through a third-party application or on your own Web site. But to make it doubly obvious, Facebook has this to say:

"In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo. You may, however, condition entry to the promotion upon becoming a fan of a Page."

Suggested workarounds: If you can’t afford to build your own contest application, check out WildFire, a flexible system for creating photo contests, giveaways, etc. It costs money, but you can get a pretty nice limited-time campaign set up for about $100.

Or you can just do it all on your wall anyway and hope you fly under the radar. The punishment for violators is not made clear in the rules, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t be pretty if Facebook actually decided to drop the hammer on your page.

2. Create user profiles under your business name.

Many, many businesses continue the old MySpace practice of creating user accounts under their business name. To clarify, this is the account you use to log into Facebook. It should be your personal name, not a business name.

Another popular system is to create a “work account” for yourself under your real name on Facebook so that you can use it to administer pages while keeping it separate from your personal account.

Both of those approaches seem fine, but they’re also prohibited by Facebook’s Terms of Use.

Facebook wants you to use your personal account as your sole access point for work and personal issues, and to be fair, there are plenty of ways to keep the two separate. The network also wants to reserve user accounts for real users and steer businesses to Pages.

As a compromise of sorts, Facebook has a little-known option of creating a “business account” to help you administer ads and pages. But that’s about all you can do — there’s no Wall or networking options.

Also, you’re not supposed to create a business account if you already have a personal account on Facebook, which means this option essentially applies to no one. From Facebook’s Help Center:

Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If you already have a personal account, then we cannot allow you to create business accounts for any reason. You can manage all the Pages and Socials Ads that you create on your personal account.

Violating that rule gives Facebook “the right to terminate all of their accounts.” Good times.

Recommended workarounds: There really is no reason to have a business-named user account. It weakens your search presence on Facebook and confuses potential fans. So just stick with your personal account. If you feel this opens you up to unwanted friend requests from coworkers and clients who might share admin status with you on a page, just explain that your account is for personal activity only. There’s no shame in setting your social network boundaries and sticking to them.

3. Geotarget your content to a specific city or state.
(Facebook seems to be of two minds on this.)

I have to admit, this one baffles me. Last year, Facebook allowed brand pages to post status updates that were targeted to a specific city, state, region or language. This was a fantastic addition for companies and organizations that didn’t want to annoy fans with updates that were irrelevant to their area.

But check out this line in Facebook’s very clearly written Page Guidelines:

Pages can only post content and information under the "everyone" setting.

Which seems to be a pretty stark contradiction from this section of the Help Center:

Can I publish posts to specific fans, instead of to everyone?

Yes, you can publish posts, links, photos, and videos to fans based on... Yes, you can publish posts, links, photos, and videos to fans based on location and language. This is controlled via the ‘Customize’ option, located in the dropdown next to the ‘Share’ button in the publish box. A post that is published to Facebook users in a specific location or language will only be visible to those users. All other users will never see the post in the News Feed, on your Page, or anywhere else across Facebook.

Suggested workarounds: Keep doing it. I’m not sure what happened with the phrasing on the geotargeting rules, but I’ve contacted Facebook to see if we can get it clarified. If nothing else, it just goes to show that Facebook’s rules are always evolving and expanding to the point where they can sometimes become contradictory. It’s important for businesses to keep up with these changes — and to help Facebook clear up such discrepancies.

4. Use exclamation points in ad headlines.

I’ve seen some “self-serve” ads get away with this on Facebook, but it’s worth noting anyway (and, I assure you, it will be enforced if you do a large-scale ad buy):

• Exclamation points cannot be used in the title of any ad.

Other prohibitions from the Advertising Guidelines:

• Ads cannot contain repeated and unnecessary punctuation (such as "Buy now!!!").

• All complete sentences (including if the ad title is a complete sentence) must end with a single punctuation mark. Sentences cannot end with ellipses, dashes, etc.

• Symbols cannot be used for the following:

1. To substitute for letters (e.g. "$ave" instead of "save");
2. To substitute for entire words (e.g. "&" instead of "and" or "$" instead of "cash/dollars/money");
3. As unnecessary abbreviations to shorten character count (e.g. "w/" instead of "with" or "@" instead of "at").

Some might find Facebook’s many (and there are many) ad content rules to be restrictive, but in an age where texting and instant messengers have wreaked havoc on the English language, I actually love Facebook for this.

5. Violate Section 11.

The previously mentioned “Facebook Pages Terms” that seem to prohibit geotargeting also contain this mysterious warning:

8. If you display advertising on your Page, Section 11 of this Statement also applies to you.

What’s that you say? There is no Section 11? I’m afraid you’ve delved too deeply and discovered the Secret Rules of Facebook. An elite squad of assassins has already been dispatched to your location.

Suggested workarounds: Stick to crowded places, listen for footsteps, and seriously, seriously spend some time updating your privacy settings.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Photo credit: Neubie on Flickr.