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Does Facebook Hate Christmas?

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Linkbait title aside. This is the story of a holiday card gone wrong because of Facebook's advertising rules.

Backstory: I work at a co-working space in Washington, DC called Affinity Lab. This happened to one of my co-workers, Mike who works at a company called ISG.

His company created a virtual holiday card and shared it on Facebook. It seems innocuous enough. In his words 'it's a no brainer to boost posts for $5, it goes from 10% to 100% for us.' This wasn't the first time he's done this and he's never had any issues. He just wanted all his clients to see the post.

And then it wasn't boosted.

And then this notification came through.

So the issue was too much text in a holiday card.

So we checked out with Facebook's tool. And it was astonishing how they calculated that it broke the rules. I can imagine a lot of content that is really awesome that you couldn't promote if this rule is really strictly enforced (every infographic ever?). I understand the spirit of the rule, but in practice it seems quite flawed.