Meta suspended my account in the middle of a product launch, and here's what happened next. Welcome back to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast, where we talk all about the strategies and solutions to make you more money in your retail or e-commerce business. One Sunday morning, not so long ago, I sat on the sofa with my cup of tea.

We were smack bang in the middle of launching our biggest event of the year. The double my holiday sales bootcamp I'd been posting. Like three to five times a day across TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Not doing this automatically. I had very strict instructions from my content assistant that I had to be posting manually.

I had to be replying, I had to be engaging. Now, this is not something that I enjoy doing. I just find social media draining. I've been around for a really long time, and as much as I'm fine with replying to people, uh, social media just drains the energy out of me. I'm not the kind of person who sits on Instagram and just doom scrolls.

I was a couple of days behind when it came to doing the engaging and replying, and as you can imagine. In the middle of a launch, you've got a lot happening. And so with Camilla's voice in the back of my mind nagging me to keep up the work, I got up at 5 31 morning and armed with my cup of tea on the sofa, I was determined to spend at least half an hour, replying, engaging, clicking, like, you know, all those kinds of things.

I had my phone, I opened up my business page on Facebook to see an alert. We've suspended your page. You'd think that I would be panicking, but actually I wasn't, because this has happened to me before. It happened about six months ago when someone tried to hack my account. I knew that I just had to go through some two-factor authentication steps.

The first time it happened, it really freaked me out. This time I was kind of like, oh, it's all good. I just have to go through the multifactor authentication, and it will all be fine. I clicked through the buttons. We've suspended your page. This is because SEL and I, retail growth strategist goes against our community standards.

The button said, see details? I'm like, yep, click. Your page has been unpublished. This is because SEL and I, retail growth strategist goes against our community standards. Okay. Continue click. Then there was a a page that said how we make decisions. We use the same community standards all around the world, whether we use AI technology or a review team to remove anything that doesn't follow our standards as quickly as possible.

Okay, this is a little bit different. Maybe they've just changed out the process. Then it said, we don't allow certain things on Facebook including graphic violence, hate speech harassment, bullying, nudity, sexual activity, and sexual exploitation. There's none of that on my page. So I clicked continue, and it said, what would you like to do except the decision or disagree?

Well, which one do you think I clicked the disagree button. A popup comes up that says, sorry something went wrong. There's a technical problem with this feature. We're working to get it fixed. I'm like, okay, I'll just leave it. I thought, oh, you know what I'll do. I'll just try it on my laptop. I grab out my laptop, go through the whole process.

Same thing. I'd just gotten a brand new phone and I figured, well, you know what? It's got the latest of everything. I hadn't quite moved over to the new phone yet, but you know what? I'll go and log in on that phone. I'll try that. I go through the process. Same thing. Hmm. Okay, well, you know what? I pay to be meta verified, so I'll just go in and use the support function.

I was actually really surprised because this point, it is a Sunday morning at 7:00 AM and someone actually called me. We have no faith in meta doing anything, but I got a phone call. And at that point I was feeling very, very smug about the fact that I was paying for that blue tick and it was paying off right about now.

So the goal went through all of the process again. She had me record a Screencast to send to the technical department. She had me record a screencast on my both of my phones and my laptop to prove that it wasn't working. I figured all this stuff would be sorted out by lunchtime. If you are listening, just like an episode of Grand Designs, where the opening shot says 2022, you'll know that that did not go to plan or I would not be recording this episode.

I realized later that day that even though my Instagram page was still working, my ads account had been shut down. In fact, when I dug in a little bit deeper, the ads had stopped running on Friday night. Remember, this was Sunday. At this point, let me remind you that this was the biggest launch for us of the year.

My ads budget for 10 days was in the range of 40 to a hundred thousand dollars, depending on our cost per lead, with another five figures to be spent promoting our SC store accelerator a couple of weeks later. So for me, I was looking at anything from maybe one to $200,000 of ad spends, and so for ads to stop running only a couple of days into a 10 day campaign, that would have a huge effect on the outcome.

At this point, I think we'd only spent around $5,000 because we had a strategy which was a lot of top of funnel ads, and they'd been running for a few days and they were all designed to ramp up spending over the weekend. And this is the point where I started to freak out. Remember, I'm in a very condensed period of time on the biggest launch of the year, so I was on chat.

I've been on the phone to Meta for pretty much most of Sunday and Monday and Tuesday. So finally on Wednesday, a new meta person was able to figure out that the problem wasn't in fact hate speech or nudity. It was actually an ad that I had created, and it was a B-roll ad of some store windows with text over the top.

Now this was footage that I had taken inside of a shopping mall. But the problem was you could see the Louis Vuitton logo in the video, and that ad was flagged as IP infringement. Now, it was rejected the minute it was uploaded. It never ever ran. We got alerted that the ad was rejected. The agency didn't think anything of it.

I didn't think anything of it. We just redid the ad with some different footage in the background, and it was running fine. The meta rep suggested that I delete the rejected ads out of the account. And I lodge an IP infringement appeal, which I did while she was on the call with me. We're just a few days in the offending in air quotes.

Ads had been removed, the appeal had been lodged, and on top of that, I also had a request to reinstate my account. So I ended up with a couple of different support tickets. One was to reinstate my ads account, one was to unsuspend my page, and then we had this IP infringement appeal, so the days passed.

And still nothing. No ads, no Facebook business page. My ads had been shut down for a week, 50% of my marketing period, and in fact, I'm 50% time-wise, but probably about 80%. Budget wise, because this, as I mentioned, the strategy we had was to do top of funnel, which is to get people who don't know you interested in your page with some content that isn't a direct call to action.

So in the first four days we were running a lot of money into that, but the amount that you spend is much lower because it's not a conversion. And so that was all supposed to happen in from the weekend through the second week. Let's remember at this point, my Instagram account is still live. Technically, my business account was still active.

I could reply to comments, I just couldn't post. This all went through. We did not get our ads back in time for bootcamp launch. Now, the bootcamp Facebook group opened on the 15th of September, and it wasn't until that moment that I realized. That our main point of interaction was this Facebook group. For the bootcamp, I'd set it up several weeks beforehand.

My team were the only members, but I realized at that point I didn't even know if I would be able to access the group. I jumped in and just as I was about to, just as the email was about to go out to tell everybody that the group was now open. All of a sudden I've realized that I don't know if I can use the group.

So we paused the email going out while I was trying to work out. If I could access, now, my team could obviously access it, but I'm the one hosting the event, and so I needed to be able to post, I open up the group side with relief. Oh, great. Okay. I can get into the group. It's still here. I couldn't post. I couldn't post a damn thing.

And so I had to go and quickly create an alternative profile and then add this profile. As an admin. I'm sure that technically I'm not supposed to be doing it, but I'm in a situation here where, yes, I could post as my team, but the reality is. I needed people to be able to see me as a person, and I felt very, very unprofessional at this point.

So I created a new profile. I added this profile as an admin, and then I was able to post using this alias account. And so I was sitting at my desk a couple of days later when I saw an email pop up and it said that my meta verified account had been canceled. Okay. Now the thing is. You might kind of say, well, you know, you're paying your money and you, you, yes, you lost your blue tick.

But what it also meant was that my level of support instantly vanished. So when you pay for the blue tick, you get a different level of support. I mean, we all think we don't, but it was clear that people were calling me and I did have that extra level of support. That they were helpful. You know, that's still to be argued, but all of that disappeared.

So we were halfway through bootcamp and I was still relying on this alias profile to post, and I was hoping that my ads account would be restored because straight after bootcamp we were opening the doors for the last Scalia store Accelerator of the year. Hmm, I was messaging daily. Remember, I've got three support tickets at this point.

Each one, I was messaging daily trying to get updates. I was just getting these very poorly worded emails back, telling me to be patient whilst I was still posting on TikTok and YouTube. I didn't have those systems set up to advertise on those platforms because for us, meta had worked so well in the past.

That is where all of our traffic came from. Now, the other thing was, I didn't have any TikTok juice or YouTube juice. If, if you get what I mean, in the sense that. I had only really started posting on these profiles. Like I occasionally would post on TikTok maybe once a week, and YouTube, my podcast would go out.

I hadn't been using those platforms until these last few weeks, and so I didn't have a huge following on each of those platforms, and I didn't have the authority on those platforms, whereas my Facebook and Instagram had been around, my Facebook had been around since 2015, so what is that, 10 years in fact, longer than that, I think.

And my Instagram has been there since Instagram started, whenever that was. During the bootcamp launch, because of my frequent posting, I was getting around 500 to a thousand followers a week in my Facebook and Instagram. So the loss of being able to communicate directly with those people who I already had had implications, but also the fact that I potentially lost several thousand new followers again.

Impacted everything that happened down the line. We are looking at the implications of something like this, which is not just, I can't post anymore. So the first thing was I lost potential followers. So there was an opportunity cost of, I could have had maybe another one, two, 4,000 followers because I was paying to bring those people in.

I lost the ability to directly communicate with the people that I already had. I lost the ability to be able to retarget those new followers with ads to either expose them to my brand, to invite them into the bootcamp, or to sell into the scale your store accelerator. And that remember, was a key strategy in our ads campaign.

Now what did that mean financially? It meant that we didn't get the signups to the bootcamp we had, were way lower than our projected numbers. We couldn't retarget my existing list. We couldn't retarget people who engaged with ads or my page or my website. All of that pixel data, nearly 15 years worth of data was gone.

It was unable to be leveraged. And sure I could have scrambled to advertise on TikTok and YouTube, but the reality is the data that I had on those platforms was only a couple of months old. Remember, I'd only really been posting like hardcore posting in the last month. So whilst I had a few followers, the people who were, who had just come to my, my YouTube channel and my TikTok didn't really know who I was.

We had launched a campaign this year to drive reviews to my Facebook page because I'll be honest with you, I have not been great at asking for reviews. So hey, my friends, if you're listening, I would love it if you could head over to Google and give me a review, whether it's for the podcast, whether it's for a program that you've ever purchased from us, but because we'd run this campaign to my Facebook page, all of that social proof that we had gone into gathering.

Just disappeared. So if you can think about this, if someone is new to your brand and they're trying to find out, you know, is this person sketchy? Are they legit? Do I want to do their program and should I sign up for this bootcamp? And if we had directed everybody to Facebook, all of those reviews are now gone.

Then we had the issue with the ability to have conversations via dm. So it's interesting on Instagram. The amount of communication we get is a much less than we get on Facebook. I get a lot more longer form comments on Facebook and a lot more dms on Facebook. Now, that could be because people feel that Facebook is more of an, more of a conversational platform than Instagram.

Maybe it's just my people, but losing the ability to have conversations with these people had, again, huge implications on what happened to this launch and what happened to our business. So if I can just recap the financial impact here of losing this page. First of all, the ad spend that was working was now gone.

Now, sure I had that cash sitting in my bank account, but it was be there to be leveraged, to be multiplied through this campaign, through this product launch, there was the cost of followers. So given the indicative content that we were producing. I probably lost around two to 4,000 of my potential followers where we were paying to put this top of funnel content in front of them.

There is the cost of rebuilding this audience somewhere else. If I have to go ahead and do that, there is the time cost of managing the crisis. Now, there were days worth of my time and I'm gonna put my hand up and say, we time track everything. I didn't time track that, and so that was a poor form on my part because it would've been really good to be able to go and say, this crisis cost us X amount of time, but it was literally days worth of my time.

I had to consistently verify that I was the account holder. So even though I had people on my team who were authorized admins, and then I had my agency who was authorized meta would only speak to me. So the cost. Was significant. There was an emotional impact. I felt powerless throughout all this. I had over a decade of work just vanish overnight, and as I sit here recording this multiple times a day, I wonder, what if I can't get it back?

Now I am staying optimistic, but the truth is, I am now at the point where I have to make a decision as to whether I go and start a, at this point, I've decided I will probably start a company page. So we will either do a retail academy or retail strategist page, and a new business manager account that is attached to that page.

So if my Selena Knight retail strategist page comes back, I will use that as my personal brand and as my primary page. But I think having this company page is a good option for us moving forward in the future, and then have it having its own business manager account. Now, I have always talked about the fact that social media is rented real estate and literally at the whim of a bot.

You can be evicted regardless of how much rent you're paying. Remember, at this point, I spend six figures, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in ads. I was paying for the blue tick. Like for all intents and purposes, I'm a pretty high value customer, but that. Means nothing. You do not own social media real estate, but you do own your email list.

You do own your SMS subscribers. You do own your website traffic. You do own a physical community. If you have a store, you own your customer database, you own your podcast listeners, you own your YouTube subscribers, and diversification is a must. I've always said don't put all of your eggs in one platform basket, but it makes it really hard because if one works for you.

Then it makes sense where focus goes, the money flows, where focus goes, the energy flows. And so if you are diluting all of your platforms, then you know when the crisis hits, you can say, well, hey, at least I, I've been posting over here. But by the same time, I'm usually the kind of person who says, you know, if this thing's working well, let's do more of it.

These automated systems can literally make life-changing decisions for us. The reality is there is no real recourse for most business owners. Even if you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads a year, even if you have a reputable ads agency, at the end of the day, even if you're paying for the Meditech, really does mean that as business owners we have to have this multi-channel acquisition strategy.

We need to be finding ways to get people off social media. And onto a platform that you own, like your email list. And we do this with things like freebie downloads, like checklists and eBooks, or incentivizing people to give you their email or their phone number. Maybe offering a free gift or maybe a discount with their next order if they sign up to these platforms.

The great thing for me was that I had a really good list. I'm so mindful of this, you know, I often do freebies to get people onto my email list. I hadn't really done this on TikTok and YouTube because, because I'd only been doing it for, you know, four weeks or so. I've realized now that that needs to be one of our strategies as we move through to 2026, is getting those people through from those other platforms onto our database.

The other thing I've really learned from this is that your marketing needs to be able to survive losing a single platform and. I've been doing this for a long time. I've been on Facebook since I started, and I didn't think that. Anything that we did would be controversial or would contravene any standards, and even though I kind of broached the conversation about creating that separate business page in the past, the feedback I got was, you know what, Sal, you have a hard enough time dealing with one page.

How are you gonna deal with two? I did not have. And this is something I've learned, I didn't have an alternative strategy if something went wrong, other than leveraging my email list and leveraging SMS, the good thing for me is that for bootcamp, I was lucky enough to be able to draw on that existing list.

And whilst we didn't hit our targets that we had allocated for new subscribers, which we were going to acquire through ads, we did hit exactly our organic target. So the number of people who signed up, either from my existing pages across all the platforms or from my email list, we literally to the number hit that target.

But. We didn't hit all of the additional subscribers and people into the bootcamp who were going to come through ads. Guys, if it happened to me, not everybody here is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on ads. If it happened to me, it can happen. Two you one algorithm decision could take your business away from you.

If you rely on Instagram, if you rely on Facebook, that going. Could change your business. For us, the cost, we haven't actually sat down and worked it out just yet. Just because bootcamp, I'm recording this just after bootcamp has finished. It's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not close to the million dollar mark, that the implications of not being able to hit the targets that we wanted because we couldn't run ads.

For some people, that's devastating. We've gotta be okay. But if you are relying on that for a big product launch and all of a sudden you are stuck with a whole bunch of inventory, how are you going to move it out? So the platform that you build your business on has to be one that you own. And using rented property, like social media, the companies that own these don't owe you anything.

And so if I can tell you one thing, it is, you need to make sure that you are getting people off social media and onto your email list or onto a channel that you own. Where to from here if you haven't already guessed it. I do not have my account back. It's now nearly a month later and I'm still using my alternative account to post in my existing Facebook groups.

My Instagram still works fine. I have only two tickets in now that have been supposedly escalated. One of my other tickets for the, I don't know which one it was. I have one for my page, one for my ads account, and one for my IP infringement. One of those has just disappeared off the face of the earth.

It's completely disappeared out of my business manager. I'm not sure which one is still remaining, but I have two tickets that have apparently both been escalated and every couple of days I ask for an update for one ticket. I get, honestly, it says. Kindly be patient. That's the email and then it just has a whole bunch of gobbledygook underneath.

The person I'm dealing with is getting a little bit antsy. The last one that I got was I told you kindly be patient, so she'd just written, I told you in front of kindly be patient for the IP infringement Appeal. Absolutely nothing. So I have now gone and lodged a dispute with the Ombudsman. I've actually done this before and was quite successful for something completely different with regards to Facebook.

So just yesterday, I have lodged a dispute with the ombudsman to try and get this sorted, but the reality is I still can't run ads. My next step is my ads agency, and I have a meeting tomorrow. We've discussed this separate page with the separate business manager. The saving grace here is that a pixel can actually be put into more than one business manager account.

So whilst I have, look, you know, currently my ads account is suspended, the pixel data can be moved into a new account. But what I lose is. 12 years of ads campaigns, 12 years of reporting, 12 years of Facebook juice, of Facebook learning, and knowing who has interacted with my page. All of that disappears.

So the pixel data of people who have been to my website, who have been to different pages, who have down, you know, downloaded whether they've purchased or added to cart, or downloaded or submitted an application, that data I, I get to own. But the reality is that is just. That's just a portion of the whole, so what I will say to you in terms of non-negotiables for your business is own your customer data as much as you possibly can.

Build your email list and use your email list. Like your business depends on it, because the reality is at some point it just might do collect phone numbers. For SMS, that was one thing that we have done. And we had done prior to this launch is four of all of our freebies that we have, and we usually release one every couple of months.

We never used to require people to put a phone number in, but now we do. Now we require people to put a phone number in. Now I know that our conversions may be lower for that, but that was a smart move that I made a few months ago, and I did that knowing we were coming into this launch and knowing that SMS has a much higher deliverability rate and it has a much higher.

Open rate because I think it's like 99% of SMSs get read. You need to have a email database or a CRM system that you control. Nobody else. If you are relying on Facebook Business Manager to track all of your customers, or if you're using something like comment sold to do all of your selling, if that goes away.

You could literally be screwed, my friends, if you don't already diversify your traffic sources. And as I said, I've, I've started doing this and the reality is I will probably continue to automate the content that goes out to my YouTube and my TikTok rather than the Instagram and Facebook because they.

Slash were my primary channels, I will post those manually. But we do have software that we can use to push everything out automatically. And so at this point. We will start to leverage those channels more to be able to build up the list. So we have plans on both TikTok and YouTube, YouTube running ads to gain our subscribers and for TikTok to releasing some more freebies to be able to get those people from TikTok back onto the list.

Don't rely on the metaverse, my friends. Make sure that you invest in your email, invest in your SMS, invest in your SEO. Partnerships, pr, all those kinds of things because this was the first time that we'd run bootcamp in this style. We'd run bootcamp at the same time last year, but it was a little bit different.

And so because this was our first time, we didn't go out and partner with other companies to be able to promote it. This was kind of our, I guess it was kind of our soft launch just to make sure we had everything right. It was engaging. People were happy with the content. We had all the systems built in the background.

We've now built that to be able to go out to our, you. People who we can partner with, our friends, our affiliates, to be able to make it bigger in the future. Pr, things like that. Making sure that you are able to get your message out and build your own audience. Use blogs on your website to drive more traffic.

Maybe you might wanna start a podcast because you own your RSS feed. If you're not already using YouTube, think about whether you can take some of your existing content and put it over onto YouTube because. It's a lot less fickle than meta is in terms of insurance, making sure that you own all of your data, like making sure when I lodged my appeal with the, uh, the ombudsman, they asked me if I wanted a financial settlement.

I had to, um, an R because we have lost a huge amount of money as a result of this. But at this point, I have to wonder if get, just getting my account back is going to be enough. And I, that's probably what we will do in the future. It's like if we can just get it back, we'll just run some ads and we'll be able to, to boost it back up again.

Making sure that you export your data and you have like, make sure you always have a backup admin inside of your business manager, whether it is your partner, whether it is someone on your team, making sure that if something happens to you, because here's the thing. I can still post on my personal account.

A lot of people thought that I had posted something on my personal account, which had affected my business account. I don't post guys. If you were my friend on Facebook, you would see that I maybe post once a month. And so the thing is I can still post on my personal page. I can still post on Instagram.

It was just the ads account, which was connected to my business page. Those two things together were the things that broke. Make sure that you know as much as you possibly can, what is allowed and what isn't? Because here's the thing, I always post the Louis Vuitton windows. I used to go to a business club.

I've changed to a new business club, but the business club I was at was right next door to the Louis Vuitton store in Sydney. And so I would go there and every time the windows changed, I would post it on Instagram and I would post it on Facebook. I have done that for years, and never once was it flagged.

I feel like the issue was because I tried to monetize it. I tried to use that content as an ad. No one's quite told me, but here's what I'm thinking with what I know that because I tried to monetize somebody else's logo, even though it was just in the background, it had nothing to do with the store. It was just the windows.

But you could just see the top of the Louis Vuitton logo. I feel like that was the thing that triggered it. They feel like I was trying to use somebody else's brand to promote. The reality is it's ai. Who knows, you know, who knows how long it will take for a real person to review it. I'm hoping that once the ombudsman gets involved, we can kind of speed up that process because it's already been escalated.

But the truth is right now, it has forced me to think differently. I'd gotten a little bit complacent. I knew that at the end of the day, this was the thing that worked for me. And I was kind of running with it. These, I was gonna say, opportunities. It's these occurrences that we have to see as opportunities because I had gotten complacent, but I see this as the opportunity to.

Create that business page to create that backup, to build a more stable business, to be able to go and make sure that we leverage these other channels like TikTok and YouTube that we kind of hadn't gotten around to, because all of these things together will mean that the next bootcamp we run will be bigger and better, and the cost to me will be lower because if we're converting people who are already on our list, we've already paid for them.

So I'm hoping that moving forward, my ads budget goes down. Hoping, hoping fingers crossed. The whole reason for me sharing this with you is because I want you to learn from all of the stuff that happens to me, so hopefully it doesn't happen to you. So do not wait for a crisis to diversify. Start now while you still have access.

Go and look at your Facebook or Instagram data. Make sure you screenshot or download any important content or reviews that you might have had. We have done that, I may have been able to reach out to some of those people via Instagram and ask them to come and leave a review on Google. The big thing for me also was making sure having an admin person on my business account who could log in because.

At the end of the day, in this case, it didn't make a difference because it was the the page that shut down. But I've seen before where other people have had this, that having somebody else on your team or having your partner being able to access means you can still get into your account. So my friends, there you go.

That is what happened when to me when meta suspended my account in the middle of our biggest launch of the year. I'm still holding out hope. If you're listening to this, I would love it if you could go and leave a review for me over on Google or on the podcast platform that you're listening to. It would make mean the world to me, and I will see you on the next episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast.

Thank you so much for joining me. Bye guys. So that's a wrap. I'd love to hear what insight you've gotten from this episode and how you're going to put it into action. If you're a social kind of person, follow me at the Selena Knight and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently or gave you some inspiration.

Or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review on your platform of choice, because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and e-commerce stores just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it's a win for you, a win for your community, and a win for your customers.

I'll see you on the next episode.