Earlier this year, Randa Salloum faced what many small business owners dread: Meta deactivating her business’ social media account.
One morning in May, Salloum awoke to a message that her store’s Instagram account had been suspended. The loss of the Collective Will Secondhand & Vintage account meant Salloum lost a profitable revenue stream and a vital link to her local community.
“It’s the immediate, without-warning disconnect from the community that you’ve cultivated and everything that you have worked on for three years. It’s just gone, and you are just left to deal with the fact that it’s gone, and like, truly, it’s a grieving process,” Salloum told Daily Hive in May.
When she reached out to Meta for an explanation, she got nowhere. That’s when she took matters into her own hands to sort out her situation once and for all.
Salloum decided to create a backup Instagram account for her store and report herself for intellectual property violations to fast-track the process of speaking to a Meta representative instead of an automated response.
The clever move worked, and she was promptly connected to a representative who told her what she needed to do to reinstate the account.
“Within hours, I heard back from an actual person who told me what happened to my account and who reported it and gave me their contact info,” she said.
Salloum discovered that brand protection company MarqVision had reported her account on behalf of Telfar, a global bag brand. According to Salloum, the company had reported her account for intellectual property violations because it believed she was selling counterfeit Telfar bags through Collective Will Secondhand & Vintage.
“They said that they found content on my page that appeared to be inauthentic items,” Salloum shared. “I informed them that everything that I sell that requires authentication was authenticated and that I only sell authentic goods.”
“They also should have contacted me directly. If they just looked at my website, they would see I’m a legitimate business.”
Salloum described the situation as “infuriating.”
Unfortunately, the Meta representative shared that the only way to reinstate her business account was for the original reporter to contact Meta to reverse the report.
“I told them how they had devastated my business, how much revenue I had potentially lost, how detrimental this is to my small business,” Salloum shared.
The brand protection company contacted Meta to reverse its mistaken report and apologized to Salloum. After 52 days, her account was finally given back to her, but Salloum was “fuming” that the situation happened in the first place.
“I felt helpless. I felt like everything that I had grown was just destroyed by this company that already has so much success,” she said.
“It was like a gut punch because I was not even given the opportunity to explain. I never even had a chance.”
Despite the lengthy and arduous process of getting her account back from Meta, Salloum is relieved that her store’s account is now up and running again.
“When I had the account reinstated, I just started bawling my eyes because I was so proud of myself that I managed to get it back without the assistance of a lawyer.”
Now she has regained control of her business’ social media account, she has taken her situation as a lesson and is no longer using her account for sales.
“I use the Instagram very differently. It’s not targeted towards sales; it’s targeted more towards a community that we’re cultivating,” Salloum shared. “I’m not putting brand names, so I’m being lost in search engines on there. I’m too scared to post anything that’s like a big brand.”
Salloum wants her experience to act as a warning to other small businesses about the dangers of relying on social media.
“I know how important Instagram can be for the growth of [a] business and for the promotion of [a] business,” she said.
“This was a lesson for me, and it should be for other businesses to not put so much stock in Instagram.”