Is Facebook an important part of your marketing campaign? Do you value your Facebook business page? For most companies, Facebook is a great way to connect with, communicate with and market to your audience. What if, after all your hard work developing a following on the social platform for years the page just disappeared? Today, we will learn from SocialMediaExaminer.com  exactly what to do if your Facebook page completely disappears from existence  as well as what steps to take in advance to help you through a traumatic experience such as the one they went through.

 

Social Media Examiner’s Founder and CEO, Michael Stelzner explains what steps he took to try to recover their Facebook page after it vanished into thin air one Sunday afternoon in November. The publication’s Facebook page is well known in the online marketing and social media marketing industry and has over 400,000 followers. After confirming that the page could not be found under any of the administrators’ accounts, the first thing he did was post to his personal network on Facebook and asked for advice.  Here were some of the initial questions he received and also a good 5 step plan to check initially:

 

  • Did any of your admin accounts get compromised?
  • Are you spending enough to have a dedicated rep?
  • Any notifications from Facebook?
  • Are you accidentally unpublished?
  • Did you move it to the Business Manager?

If all 5 questions can be answered in the negative, move on to the next step.

The next step is to report the missing page to Facebook on their support page.

Then, tap into your social network while you await a response from Facebook. Building connections is a big part of social media. You should be making connections all the time so that when a situation like this arises, like Stelzner, you can tag or reach out to any of your connections that you know have contacts inside Facebook. He learned from his contacts that he should have set up a Business Manager account, and that would have granted him access to someone who has a big spending budget on Facebook and could have escalated the issue to support. One of his contacts made an email introduction to someone at Facebook who was able to let Stelzner know that the page was still there and had not been deleted. The problem was that something was preventing it from being “published”. At this point it was already 9 or 10 hours since the page vanished, so Stelzner escalated the messaging and calls for help on social media making his posts public and posting to his Facebook groups. He updated original posts with a “No Progress” note. He asked all staff members to share it on their social channels to broaden the scope and reach of the appeal for help. On the morning of day two, he heard from the office in Europe who had received a call from Facebook because they had submitted a support request for advertisers. It turns out the whole reason the page disappeared in the first place was part of a more widespread problem that affected other business pages too; but the scary part is that Facebook wasn’t even exactly sure what happened but said that “it appears a back-end alert was triggered that caused [their] page and several others to go invisible temporarily.”  To read more details about this and even to hear about the ordeal first hand, listen to the Social Media Examiner’s podcast.

If you require further information or have any specific questions, don’t hesitate to give a member of the GoPromotional team a call on 0800 0148 970 or simply email us today.