Instagram Banned Me

Oh, golly. So last week, my Instagram account got shut down, and it was a bummer. It was very frustrating because I couldn’t understand what was going on. It’s a very strange feeling. Over the years, we’ve posted probably 500 unique pieces of content to Instagram and to have that account just shut down out of the blue with no explanation and no repercussion, no way of talking to anybody over at Facebook or meta to explain the situation, to try and get some clarity about what’s going on, was incredibly frustrating. And I want to share this with you, because as you are building your business, one of the ways that we talk about getting leads is through organic content. And you do that by putting content on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, all these different platforms. And the risk is that you don’t actually own those audiences, which is why I’ve always referred to these as temporary pieces of content.

Right. This is temporary content and evergreen content, but the goal is to drive people towards our owned media. And this was just reinforced for me because Instagram, in the grand scheme of things, is our smallest platform. I think we only had 10,000 subscribers on there. So it wasn’t the end of the world one way or the other. When LinkedIn has 100,000, YouTube has over 200,000. So those are like the bigger channels that I would have been way more bummed out to lose access to. But it still kind of hurt on Instagram to lose that.

And what I realized is that if that had been my primary, my sole means of, you know, lead generation for a business, I would be in a lot of trouble right now. And in fact, for escape, climbing back in 2017, Instagram was our primary lead generation source. I think to this day, we only have maybe 9000 subscribers or followers on escape. But it alone contributed to probably, I would say, 40% of our overall sales, which would have been just over, like one and a half million dollars. So that would have been a big bummer. And it took us many years, actually. I didn’t realize this at the time, that we were so vulnerable to that one platform, if they ever decided to shut us down, that we’d be screwed, right? And it wasn’t until many years later that we started off boarding our customer list to an email list, so that we actually had a way of following back up with our customers, not just depending on that social media platform, but that is the moral of the story here that I want to share with you is that, yes, you should be using each one of these platforms. It’s free gives you infinite potential reach to reach, you know, hundreds of thousand people.

And while I’m bummed that they shut down my account, I also have to recognize that it’s free, so I don’t have anything to really complain about. At the end of the day, it’s like, yeah, what do you want? It’s free. You get what you get, but you should be using that audience, that attention that you’re attracting on those platforms, and be thinking, how can I drive that traffic to my owned media, that being your website, to your email list? You want to collect your audience’s information as much as possible so that you have a way to reach out to them to continue that relationship that isn’t dependent on the whims and the whimsy of these different social media platforms, which sometimes, you know, even if they don’t ban you or shut you down, if they decide to change the algorithm, which we are seeing right now on LinkedIn, on Twitter, we’re seeing a massive algorithm change from what it used to be, which was more intent focused to now more interest focused. What that means is it used to be, oh, I like your content, Anthony. I’ll follow you on Twitter. And then Twitter says, okay, you chose to subscribe or engage with this content, so I’m going to give you more of this person’s content, not what they’re doing anymore. They’ve adopted TikTok’s algorithm that is more interest based. So really what they’re looking at isn’t where the content came from.

It’s not even taking a look at who you subscribe to. It’s simply saying what piece of content has the highest likelihood of getting you to engage and stay engaged on that platform. And so there’s more viral content getting fed to you rather than small content. And so it just created this big disparity. We’ll go into the weeds of this a little bit later in a different podcast episode. But what that really means is that the algorithm changes. And overnight the engagement that we were getting on Twitter on LinkedIn, it just got, like one 10th across the board. Right? And that happens.

That happens all the time. And so you need to be thinking, how do I diversify? How do I build a resilient antifragile business? That lead mechanism isn’t dependent on a single platform. And the way that you do that is whenever you’re putting out this content, to be thinking, how can I use this to drive attention back to the media that I own, how can I use this to capture that attention through lead magnets through different offers or what have you, but you need to be building out your email list. That’s really the moral of the story here. Now, we did end on a good note. So our Instagram got shut down, but we did get it back. So neat. It’s really interesting, actually, because I wasn’t the only person that this happened to last week.

Cody Sanchez also had her account. Hers was hacked. So it was a very different situation, but again, same result, which is that your account shuts down and you can’t get access to it. And that really sucks. It feels bad. In her context, that’s a little bit worse because somebody was being malicious and jumping in there and trying to take advantage of her audience, which is a real bummer. But this happens. It happens more often than not.

And so you really need to be thinking about, how can I build a resilient business that isn’t dependent on one platform and the other platform, and thinking about the funnel cohesively as a whole, not just as that one thing being the entire strategy. So if you’re overly dependent on a single platform at this moment, I highly recommend that you diversify and that you really start thinking about, how do I create that funnel that drives people towards my own media? So that’s going to do it for me. Guys and gals, I am still on Instagram, so go find me the Anthony Vacino. We got it back, but they’re flagging everything I do with spam at the moment, which is really frustrating. So. But it is what it is. It’s free, so I’m not gonna complain too much, but that’s gonna do for me. Guys and gals, I appreciate you.

And if you’re not already following me, if you’re not already on Instagram, go over there, follow me there, go follow me on Twitter, go follow me on LinkedIn, follow me on YouTube, wherever it is that you wanna follow. That way, if I ever get shut down in one place, you will be sure to get the content somewhere else. So make sure that you subscribe to the channel, subscribe to wherever you’re listening to this, if that’s on Apple or Spotify or whatever. And that would mean the world to me, guys and gals. So that’ll do it for me. I’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.