Tuesday March 23rd started like any other day. Wake up, grab phone, check Instagram (@dickens_sawmill)… Wait, it says that our account has been “Temporarily Disabled” due to some suspicious activity. Ok, hit “Send code”, double check phone number, press send…no code. “You try your phone” says Bryant. Still no dice. Check it on all the computers in the house. Panic ensues, not really but maybe a little.
We talked about how 4 years worth of time, effort, photos, and followers was potentially gone. We asked friends, who could still see and message our account. We tried again a few times throughout the day, looked for phone numbers to get in touch with IG (more on this below), and sent an email to support. Day 2 – try again, create a dickens_sawmill2 IG. Day 3 – try again, decide to rebrand, delete dickens_sawmill2, research websites. Day 4 – try again, purchase website domain, start building website (liveedgeaz.com), create liveedgeaz IG page. Day 5 – try again, keep building website, start trying to get back some followers. Day 6 – try again, publish website. Day 7 – try again…”Holy crap, we’re back on”, delete liveedgeaz IG, keep website, breathe a sigh of relief.
Here’s what we learned about being locked out of Instagram as a small business:
- It’s important to be able to market your business in may different ways, and the more you have control of, the better. Buying a domain for a website assures you have that domain, until you decide not to. Without losing access to Instagram, we may not have been motivated to build the website and look into other methods to market and promote our business.
- It takes a long time to gain organic followers. Now don’t get me wrong, we didn’t have 100s of 1000s of followers, but over 1500 real people was an achievement and took lots of posts of several years.
- Instagram doesn’t care. There are no actual numbers to contact real people. We sent an email to the support email, and we have no idea if that reached even a computer. Our account was still available to be viewed, which is good and bad. You can tag yourself from your new account, and refer people to your old site to see examples of your products. BUT, you have no control of it. ALL of your old posts, pictures, contact info is still there but you can’t control any of it. The jury is still out on whether or not DMs make it through, but it does appear to the person that sent the DM that it went to you.
- It’s a toss up if you will get it back. We were disheartened reading about the droves of people who never regained access to their accounts. We were lucky to get our account back and not feel like 4 years was wasted, only to live in Internet purgatory.
- At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It’s a tool for our business but it isn’t our whole business. We built a nice website, and started thinking outside the box on how to market ourselves.
We will continue to use IG (@dickens_sawmill), our website (liveedgeaz.com), this blog, our Etsy (https://www.etsy.com/shop/DickensWoodworks?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=920972632), Craigslist, and any other tools that are out there.
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