The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 182: My Instagram Account Disappeared

Today, I am diving into everything you need to know about creating backup systems for your content in case your social media disappears overnight. I am going to be sharing how my team and I have been working to retrieve my Instagram account, how I feel about the situation, and how you can prepare in case it happens to you.

My Instagram Account Disappeared

By: Melissa Lin

Welcome back to another episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast! Hello, hello, I hope that you have enjoyed our first second episode of the week. Since it's Monday today I'm going to be going all into something that happened to me and my business a little over a few weeks ago. If you're over on any of my social media platforms then you probably already know what I'm probably talking about. It's also at the title of this week's episode, which is my Instagram account disappeared overnight. I'm going to be going all into it today and answering all the questions about it as well. I'm really excited because there are definitely lessons that came from it and there are definitely a lot of things that I had prepared on the back end, not that I was anticipating this. I definitely did not think my account was going to get hacked and completely shut down and disappear from the Instagram World, however, we had systems in my business created around my content, so I'm definitely going to go into that. I don't want to have too many spoilers too early on. What I'm really going to dive into today is what happened with my Instagram account, my feelings around it, the things that we've tried to retrieve my account and are still working on, my lessons in ways that we were prepared in case this did happen, and so much more. So again, lots to dive into today and I’m definitely looking forward to it. Are you ready to rock and roll into this episode?

What Happened to My Instagram Account?

If you are a client and you work with me, then you know some of this. I’ve definitely shared what to prepare for and some of the lessons as well, and I'll be diving into all those details and more today. So what happened and what are my feelings around it? I know when it first happened I waited a little bit to create my new account. I waited for maybe 72 hours before I created a new account and so many were surprised by how I was handling things and how calm I was. So before I get into that, let me give you details of what happened. It was a Wednesday morning, January 19, 2022, when my account was hacked and shut down. This was over ten years of work. Ten years of building and adding value almost every single day. If you did follow me on my old account you know that we had over 39,000 amazing, amazing followers, over 1,200 posts, over 200 videos, and all of it disappeared overnight.

I know some of you listening right now might be thinking, “oh my goodness, if that happened to me I would be freaking out. I would not know what to do.” This is exactly why I wanted to create this episode so I can help prep you. Not that this will happen to you, but I want to prepare you in case something happens in the future, because social media is not guaranteed, right? It is not guaranteed to be here forever for us. It could shut down tomorrow, we don't know and I'm going to get into that. But anyways, I don’t want to scare you. Getting back into my story, what happened? It all disappeared overnight. I asked myself, will my account come back? The answer is maybe, maybe not. My team and I have been working quite a bit over the last few weeks, the last month now, to retrieve it. At the end of the day, maybe it won't come back, but I know that it's all going to be okay, and this won’t affect my business one bit. I can share with you that one month later after losing my Instagram account it has not affected my business one bit. This is because we have so many incredible systems and funnels and things built on the back end of my business, which I love supporting my clients with as well. I’ll get into all of that in just a few minutes.

Growing From the Challenges You Face

I want to remind you today that there truly is nothing that can burn your business down. There's nothing that can burn your business down and you can handle anything that comes your way. If your Instagram gets shut down or if you have something happen to your business and it feels like the hardest thing that's ever happened to you or the biggest challenge that's ever come your way, I can promise you that six months from now you're going to look back and giggle at yourself or just feel like it was not nearly as scary as it felt in the moment. In that moment it definitely will feel scary, and I definitely had a minor heart attack the minute it happened and maybe even the first hour it was going on, but I also knew at the end of the day it was all going to be okay. Everything happens for a reason. Everything happens exactly when it's meant to, exactly when it's supposed to. I truly believe that no matter what there is a win in every single scenario. In anything that happens, there’s always a win.

Instead of me being upset about my account, I see that it's now an opportunity for me to connect even more intimately with my new audience that I grow. This is now giving me the opportunity to experiment with new tools on social media that I hadn't leaned into very much prior. There's always a win in every scenario. I know that at the end of the day everything’s going to be okay and that this won’t impact my business, because we knew that social media isn't something that you want to put all of your eggs in one basket with. I'm going to give you some examples of how we were able to spread our business into other avenues as well so that in case social media shut down we would be okay. It's very possible for social media to shut down. We have had this happen multiple times over the past few years where Instagram and Facebook have both shut down for hours or for a day. Really ask yourself, what's going to happen, or how would my business run, or what would I do differently if Instagram or Facebook did shut down for a week or if I wasn't able to access those platforms?

We want to start to think even bigger with your business as you continue to grow. We want to dive into other platforms as well. I'll share a few examples on what we do and how this really didn't impact us. Even though we did have a huge account, we have so many other things going for us as well. The new account will grow. Again, we can handle anything that comes our way. So that’s kind of what happened and how I feel about it. We are still working on getting the account back, however, I'm also really leaning into growing the new account and having fun with it as well.

How We Are Working to Retrieve the Account

So the things that we tried to do and that we're still working on in terms of my account are quite a few different things, probably everything that's out there. We have chatted on the phone. I've been on the phone with Facebook support multiple times. We've been in chats with them on Facebook chat support. My team and I have contacted Instagram. It's really interesting because Facebook actually has a decent support system, they actually have decent client support. However, Instagram does not. Not one bit. You cannot get into contact with Instagram. They don’t have any kind of customer service. However, Facebook actually has decent customer service in my experience. We have submitted dozens and dozens of reports to Instagram. There are actually multiple forms that you can fill out if something happens. If you get hacked, if your account is disabled or shut down for any reason, and we’ve done all of them dozens of times, and we actually never heard back.

What happens is once you submit some of those forms Instagram will send you an email or Facebook will send you an email asking to prove your identity with a few different things to do. We did those things that were asked and every time we never heard back from Instagram again. I've heard from many other people that this has happened to them too. It’s taken them dozens and dozens of times before even getting remotely close to getting their account back. So again, we’re still trying. We’re still doing things. We’re in communication with Facebook. Unfortunately we cannot get into contact with Instagram because they have zero customer service whatsoever, but we're going to be fine at the end of the day. I have actually stepped away completely and now my team has taken full ownership over trying to get the account back, that way I can really lean into my new audience, growing the new account, supporting clients, and doing the things that I love like creating brand new content here on the podcast for you.

Preparing Ahead so You Don’t Lose Your Content

So we've done so many different things to try and get the account back, and what I really want to dive into in today's episode are some of the lessons from me losing my account and ways that we were already prepared in case this did happen. It's not that I thought my Instagram account would ever get shut down, I actually did not think this was going to ever happen. However, we know that social media always pivots. Social media is always changing, so we always get to pivot and adapt with it. Because of that, we already knew we didn't want to have all our eggs in one basket. Something similar happened, I believe it was in 2021, where my Facebook account also had some issues, and I'm definitely not alone there. This has happened to so many in the industry. Again, we did not have all of your eggs in one basket, so it did not impact the business. Fun fact actually, the month that my Facebook ads account shut down back in January 2021 my business had our first six-figure month. So even though our entire ads account was shut down we still had our biggest month back then to date. Still today, Instagram shut down and we're still growing. It did not impact the business.

I want to share some of those lessons and ways that we were already prepared without necessarily knowing this was going to happen. We always want to be prepared for some of those things. One thing I do want to share, a lesson is to just be open to pivoting when needed, especially as an entrepreneur. Things are going to happen. Challenges will come up that you were not expecting. That is almost something I can guarantee. Things pop up as entrepreneurs, as business owners, that you were not expecting, so you do want to be ready for some of these things. I've definitely had big challenges over the years, so I can definitely share this with you. The first is to be open to pivoting when needed. Again, I've said this a few times already, don't have all of your eggs in one basket. As I had mentioned, there are days when Instagram does have issues and isn't up and running. What do you do when that does happen? Some of the things that we do and what this can look like is leaning into other platforms, such as our email list. We have other social media platforms to lean into, Instagram is not the only social media platform that I'm on. Really leaning into your other sources, so my podcast. If you have a YouTube channel you can lean into that. There are definitely other platforms that you can start to add your content to so that you're growing in the other areas, not only on one. I will say if you're in the beginning stages of your business it’s probably not as necessary. I would definitely focus on those business foundations and starting to bring in some income and signing your first few clients. You definitely don't need to be on multiple platforms yet, but as you continue to grow, start to spread out a little bit. Again, really grow your email list. Your email list is the only thing that you truly own. I did a podcast episode a few episodes ago about email marketing and whether it's dead or not. You can probably guess from the way I'm speaking about email lists and email marketing that it’s not dead, not even close. It's truly the only thing that you own. If Instagram were to shut down tomorrow you would lose all of your followers that you had. You would lose all of your content that you had. You would lose everything, all your videos and everything would be gone, so we had other things ready to go in the back end in case something did happen.

I want to ask yourself, if Instagram did shut down tomorrow, would you lose all of your content? Would you lose all of your captions, all of your videos, all of your graphics? I did not lose my content, and that's something that really supported me and made it very easy to start a brand new account. I knew it wasn't going to be too difficult to start a brand new account because I had all of my content saved. Something that we do in our business is we have a bank for all of our content. We actually have a bank for a lot of things in our business; our curriculums, our graphics, other items in our business, other assets that we have. We love banking things in case things like this happen. For example, I was actually sharing this with some of my clients on a group call today, in the past, years and years ago, I used to use an external hard drive to host everything and keep everything in. I used it to keep copies of my course videos, my programs, all of my documents, everything was on this external hard drive. I remember when I made an upgrade and got a new laptop a few years ago I plugged the external hard drive after I had set the laptop up, and something happened. A weird thing happened on my screen and my external hard drive had disappeared, all of the content inside disappeared. It was gone. Luckily I've got a computer shop nearby and a week later they were able to recover about 95% of it, but I can imagine if they hadn't been able to recover that 95%. My entire business was on that external hard drive. I didn't have it backed up to the cloud back then. So now, of course, everything is over on Dropbox, Google Drive, our assets are everywhere. We've got our content bank in a content source. We actually use Airtable for this and we have an incredible template for all of our clients as well. We walk them through how we set it up, how we recommend setting it up very, very easily. Because of that I can now go through and grab all of our content and start to repurpose my older content on the new page. It just makes it so much easier.

Something else that we had set in place that really supported the business was that our lead generation did not solely rely on Instagram. Our sales coming in did not solely rely on Instagram. They were not all coming from just Instagram. We have dozens of avenues for new leads to find us every single day on other platforms as well. Whether it’s the podcast, over on Facebook or other social platforms, or bringing in leads from our email list and sharing our new lead magnets on other social platforms as well. We have lots of different ways of bringing in new leads outside of Instagram, again, it's that whole notion of not having all of your eggs in one basket for your business in terms of growth. We were able to continue to grow the business because of everything that we have spent the past few years building on the back end of our business in terms of our funnels and our sales processes. And yes, you bet that we support our clients very heavily in terms of creating this in their business as well. It definitely doesn't need to look anything like how mine looks, however we want some type of business system running for you behind the scenes so that you can continue to grow without necessarily being in your business all the time or in case one of your social platforms goes down. Again, we have lots of things set up in case things happen. We’re never worried because we always have options. We already know from being entrepreneurs that we get to adapt.

So again, my Instagram account has been shut down. We have a new account, it’s been up and running. If you are not following me there yet, please go do so. I've got lots of new goodies and brand new content that goes out every single week over there as well. I show up daily. It's the_melissalin, very similar to my old account, but now it has that little underscore after the, so it’s the_melissalin. It'll be in the show notes for you as well. Again, at the end of the day I want you to know that whatever happens in your business, any time you're having a bad day, any time things are feeling hard, you can handle anything that comes your way. Let this be a lesson for you and evidence that even though things may feel hard in the moment, you can handle them. You can handle anything that comes your way. I promise you that you can. So We’ve done things to retrieve the account, I’ve shared some of that today, and then also had so many lessons around this and ways that we were already prepped. We want you to also be prepped, so if you don't have your content saved anywhere, please do so. Definitely reach out to me over on Instagram if you don't and I can definitely share with you that platform that we use and an example. I can show you a quick screenshot or some type of example on how we bank it. Again, if you're one of my clients you have the full template. You got the full lesson on how we do this so that you can always have your content. It's not just to have it banked and have it there. We really utilize it as a system and as a tool so that we can very easily search and find content that we want. I know it sounds kind of nerdy, but I love all of these things that help make my business easier and help make things easier for my team as well.

We touched on so much today. We touched on what happened to my account, how I feel about it, things we’ve tried to do to retrieve my account, my lessons I have learned, ways we are prepped, and so much more. We are already getting ready for more episodes coming your way, I cannot wait to share them with you. Get ready for a brand new mini episode on Thursday, we have got a great question for you. I just recorded that episode this week and I cannot wait for you to hear it. We'll also have another longer episode next Monday morning right here on the Fierce Business Babe podcast.

Topics we cover include:

Creating backup systems
Retrieving a hacked account
My take on losing my account

And so much more!

Times to check out:

(09:16) How I felt about losing my Instagram account

(12:05) Using challenges you face to grow your business

(15:14) Retrieving a hacked Instagram account

(17:30) Backing up your content on other platforms

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