Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA Group, bringing premiere online promotion to your business.
Esther
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves.
Melanie
Hey, everyone, it's Melanie here. And I'm on my own today just for complete change. I don't have a guest and I don't have Esther either. And I figured I've listened to lots of podcasts where people are thereby themselves. It can't be that hard, surely. I'm not going to tell you how many takes this is. Anyway, moving on. Now, today I wanted to discuss something that happened to me earlier on this year, and it was a client that approached me with a whole new experience that I've never, fortunately, and I am touching my table here, that I've never personally experienced myself, and I really hope to never experience it myself. They had lost access to their Facebook page. Now, before I go any further, I want you to know I've only ever done this once. And under these particular set of circumstances, we were able to regain access. But I've spoken to a couple of other people since who've looked to me to get some guidance, and I haven't been able to help them.
So with a certain criteria, some of these might be useful for you. But unfortunately, if you're not meeting the exact same criteria, I'm not in a position where I can help. And literally all I did was nag META. That's pretty much all I did. But let's go through the process here. So what had happened is they'd accidentally removed themselves from their profile. And this came about because they'd had a second admin who, previously, it was an agency who'd done all of their ads for them, were managing their social profile for them. And it finished a number of years ago. And they were just trying to tidy up their profile and just make sure that the right people were on there and that thing. And quite innocence, completely by accident, they were removed from their profile. However, there was still a second admin. Now, you can only be removed if there's somebody else still on there. But then they couldn't get hold of that old admin. They weren't picking up. They weren't responding to messages, they weren't responding to any emails. It really was quite dire. So they contacted me. They were looking for some help.
They were quite panicked, obviously, and we needed to get to work straight away. Now, under this particular set of circumstances, okay, so let me clarify this. Under this particular set of circumstances, they had other pages that they were managing. So they owned and managed other pages. So we were able to report this initially as an other page issue via their business manager. And we were able to chat with somebody actually real time using the messenger facility. And this was great. It was very reassuring. The client and I, we were having a long chat with this Meta support person, and they were saying, Yes, this shouldn't be a problem. We just need to clarify a few things. And it sounded very simple from the beginning, but it wasn't. This was in the space of 24 hours. We'd lost access and within 24 hours we were speaking to Meta through the messenger chat facility, through reporting other page issue. However, after a few days, I think it was maybe three or four, the messenger stopped being the way we communicated. They moved us over to email, which is fine. But I wished I'd known that having the information that was in those messenger chats would have been useful.
And what they did is they archived those conversations and we were no longer able to access them. So everything then only went through email. There was no other way we could reach them. Now, I know for a fact that there are some people who listen to this podcast who were able to speak to Meta. What a treat that would have been. But no, we didn't get that opportunity. So once those messaging conversations were ended, like I said, we were on email. And what myself and my client did then is we messaged them daily, literally daily, sometimes a couple of times a day. And the conversations would normally go along the lines of, Okay, so what evidence do you need? We know you need evidence. What information do you need? And dribs and drabs of information would come back to us and we would submit the relevant information they were looking for. And then about two weeks later, they finally told us, Actually, we need all of this information, but we need it all in one PDF. So we'd spent a couple of weeks submitting separate bits of information and none of it was being accepted.
And it took them two weeks to tell us. So I want to make it very, very clear. You need to have this information submitted in one long PDF file that gets emailed to them. And this was like, I think it was eight or nine pages long. So it was a huge amount of information. So let me start by explaining what information that they are looking for. Okay. So first of all, they needed a copy of a valid government issued photo ID, like a driving license or a passport. And you, the individual, would have to sign a statement saying that you have the admin rights on the business manager, and you would have to say something along the lines of, I, your name, am the owner of the business. So it has to be the owner, not a member of staff. And I have the authority to request admin access to this business page and then list the business page. So that would be one of the first things they'd need. And so this signed statement would be confirming you are a person with sufficient knowledge and authority to manage this page. Then they'd need a description of your relationship to the page.
So whether you actually set it up and you're the original owner, maybe you've bought it off somebody else, which can also happen. So they need to understand the relationship. Then whoever else is managing the page in this particular instance, because we couldn't get hold of the other admin, we had to mention them. And any relationship that that person had with the page, so we had to explain that that was a previous administrator of ads. And then we had to explain the request. Now, in this particular instance, it was just a sheer fluke accident where they just removed themselves when they thought they were removing the old admin. Now, all of this may need to be supported by other documentation. Now, in this instance, we didn't need to provide it. But again, this was just us. You may need to provide certificates of incorporation, business licences, or permits, or DBA documents, or tax certificates and licences. We didn't need, personally, to submit any of those, but those were things that we could potentially have been asked to provide. We did provide utility bills and bank statements. And if you're doing ads, you'll probably get emails from Meta saying, Your Meta ad receipt.
We found these very useful. This was fantastic evidence for us. You may also be asked to provide any credit score reports or trading documents, any number of things. But this list will be given to you at the very end. Also, be very clear which Facebook email account is connected with your business page because you may have a personal and then a business one. And what they're interested in is what email address is connected to that business account, which will be your personal email address that's connected to your personal Facebook page. So it's very confusing. But however you log into your personal Facebook account, as long as you're an admin and a manager of a page, it will be connected to your personal Facebook page. That is your email address. And that also became a bit of a sticking point because they kept on saying, Oh, we thought it was this. And we're like, What made you think that? So it was very confusing. So we had all this huge long list and all this evidence that we needed to provide. And one thing that we hadn't realised at the time is that two cases had been set up.
Now, we contacted them initially and they said, okay, yeah, we're going to set up a case file for you. And they gave it a name and a job number. And we quite innocence thought that we were responding to the one query because we only reported one. But it turns out a week after we set up this initial query, Facebook had set up a second one, a number notes to us, even though we were getting two teams of people contacting us. In fairness, we were having a different person contact us all the time. We never, ever had one point of contact. So we didn't realise that we were speaking to two different teams. And it was getting really frustrating at this stage because we kept on submitting the correct information and they were like, Well, we haven't got it. And it was like, Okay, so we would have to resubmit it again. And now we know why. And so there's just so many different ways that we were being held up by the system. Now, one thing that we found the support portal. So that's Facebook. Com forward slash business forward slash help support get help. Now, when you've set up your own account with them and your first query with them, you will have one report in there.
When we found this, we realised we had two. Now, we weren't looking at the job numbers. The names that we were being sent, the names of the emails we were being sent were very, very similar. But the job numbers were completely different. And we only noticed this once we found the portal. So if you feel like you're hitting a brick wall, it's not necessarily because they don't know what they're doing. It's because there could be multiple teams dealing with one inquiry. So that's a really good place to check first. So like I said, we were following up daily. But once we found the support portal, we were responding to any queries or questions they had by email and then taking that exact same message, cutting and pasting it, and then putting it in the support portal as well. So it was a two pronged approach. There's no way they were going to say they weren't getting the information they wanted from us. So yes, we gave it back to them as quickly as possible in as many different ways as possible. And yet we still didn't get this resolved for quite a while. It is exhausting and it was extremely stressful for my client because this was his business page.
He'd lost complete access to it. The page was still there, but he couldn't post, he couldn't do ads, he couldn't do anything. There was literally no access. So over the period of one whole month and two days, we contacted Facebook, I'd say, well over 100 times, I'd say, easily. And eventually, we did get access back to his page. In fact, I remember when we did get access to it, I said to my client, I don't know, this seems too easy now. Is this real? Is this actually happening? We were both so consumed by trying to get this sorted. And we did. But I don't envy anybody going through this. I'm personally not relishing doing this again anytime soon. But it is possible to get your page back. But one big stumbling block for me, and we were so lucky we had access to this, was they asked us for the business manager ID. And the only way you know your business manager ID is by having it. And you only have your business manager ID if you have access to it. Yeah, that blew my mind because we were like, Well, how do we find out our business manager ID?
We don't have access to it. And very, very fortunately, my client, when he first added on this new admin a few years ago, they confirmed in writing the client's business manager ID in an email. And that is the only way we knew his business manager ID. I don't think if we hadn't have had that, I don't think we would have got him back on truthfully. I really don't think we would have done. So, yeah, it was long, painful, arduous, but in the end, we managed to get him full access back to his page. And the lesson learned here is it's made far too easy to remove yourself. There's just so many different layers that people have to understand to understand business manager. And purely because that last admin hadn't removed themselves properly, if they had have done, this would never have happened. So I hope this helps. I know this probably isn't made very clear because I'm doing a podcast, but you will be able to see my blog that's coming out this week. So it will be out on Wednesday this week. And I hope you find it useful. Like I said, it's only really useful for a certain criteria, but there will be some people out there that will find it useful.
If you need any clarification or any updates or anything else that I can help you with regarding trying to regain access to your Facebook page, then you know where to find me. Look me up at melanie@stomp.ie and I will do my absolute best to help you. So yeah, that was weird. I spoke to myself for a while, a whole 16 minutes. I never realised I said like so much. Anyway, I hope you found this useful and all been well and good. I'll have my podcast wife back for next week. Have a great week, guys. Bye for now.
