Spent the last year building automation tooling for FB marketers, and the biggest lesson: not all automation is created equal. Some workflows save you hours a day. Others get your account flagged within 48 hours.

What actually works:

1. Scheduled posting with randomized timing — posting at the exact same second every day is a bot fingerprint. Randomize by a few minutes.

2. Auto-replying to comments with templated-but-varied responses — keeps engagement up without you glued to the screen, as long as responses aren't identical copy-paste.

3. Warm-up sequences for new accounts — slowly ramping activity over 1-2 weeks before running heavier automation drops ban rates significantly.

What gets you banned:

1. Mass DM'ing cold leads immediately after joining a group — this is the #1 reason accounts get restricted.

2. Identical comment/like patterns across many pages in rapid succession — Facebook's spam detection is built specifically to catch this.

The difference between "automation that scales your reach" and "automation that gets you banned" almost always comes down to pacing and variation, not the actions themselves.

Building this out into FB Flow Systems if anyone wants to check out how we handle the pacing logic — happy to answer questions on automation strategy either way.