My Facebook is dead, long live Facebook.
Let me tell you about one of those times when I wished I could tell my clients, « I’m sorry, but I’ve divorced Facebook with no possibility of reconciliation. » Has this ever happened to you? Through its frequent updates that often leave us hanging, abandoning useful tools (like translation review) along the way or leaving us stranded in the middle of a translation, I often felt like I couldn’t leave a marriage that periodically causes me so much grief.
So, let’s go back to December 2019, just before lockdown, when I transferred all my clients to Business Manager to manage their ads with their credit cards instead of my company’s (and in a second step, recharge to my client).
In February 2020, a client decided to take back control of their Facebook account in the meantime, and then everything went downhill. Unable to regain access for them, I made them Business Manager admin after « unhooking » each of the other clients from the account as per Facebook’s method, and then, nothing. No one had access to their Facebook account anymore except the one who took over the Business Manager.
Panic ensued. I managed to initiate an Ownership Dispute as suggested by Facebook customer service to resolve the issue. While this allowed my clients to regain their platforms, it did nothing for my case despite having a notarized document like the others (we all went through the same notary, Christian Philie, whom I thank profusely).
Then, email after email, I kept receiving the same message from Facebook along the lines of « your clientele is important, we are doing our best, we haven’t forgotten you. » The pandemic hit, everything slowed down, and expectations dwindled.
However, on June 4, 2021, over a year later, plot twist: I was asked to take screenshots again to explain that I still didn’t have access to my pages, and I realized that my pages simply no longer existed!
Panic.
Panic.
Well, that’s it. They no longer exist. Yet, I couldn’t use their names as usernames when I opened new pages for my businesses. Kyo Interactive Marketing couldn’t reclaim @consultantsiteweb as a username, and Leaders de Demain couldn’t use @immersionanglaise. This realization gave me hope that perhaps I could recover my pages that might not have been completely (and horribly) deleted from existence after all.
Knowing who deleted my pages is not information available. Knowing what I did (or what instruction I didn’t follow) is also not information available. Here are the recommendations Facebook gave me (freely translated):
If this kind of situation happens to one of your clients, we would recommend a few points:
1. They can add another person to their page as an admin so that if they lose access to their page, this other administrator can add them back.
2. You can contact Facebook’s technical support using this link to report an account that may have been hacked: https://www.facebook.com/help/hacked
3. You can also check out these links to secure your account:
–https://www.facebook.com/help/213481848684090/
–https://www.facebook.com/help/235353253505947
So here I am, after 11 years of social media consulting, with my two pages under the correct names (I received confirmation this morning that I managed to recover my usernames), but with a blank slate to rebuild and no subscribers. *sigh
Publier par : Eveline Vinet
