9 ms·

Instagram is killing my start up

92 points by OriolRoda 6y ago

1 month ago our business was sound. We had an Instagram with over 37.000 people that was driving over 100.000USD/y revenues to our website. Then we used a program to analyze our followers (https://www.instagramhelpertools.com/). Before using this service we checked reviews and all looked good. Our surprise was that after using this service Instagram blocked our account arguing that we were a bot. We contacted them and followed their procedure to demonstrate we are human beings, nobody answered. We tried for over a month, and finally they told us our account had been permanently deleted. Instagram cancelled our account because they thought we were a bot, but paradoxically we could never talk with a human from their side to explain the situation. End result: we have lost our main sales channel from one day to the other. This is the power of the big guys.

fsflover 6y ago
I hope more people abandon the monopolies and consider federated networks instead. In this case, Pixelfed.
- standardUser 6y ago
  I can't see alternatives like that catching on unless there was a platform to combine them with the existing, dominant platforms. And I can't imagine the existing platforms allowing their systems to be used by a 3rd party in that way.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    AFAIK GDPR requires interoperability.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
The tool you used appears to be a browser plug-in, meaning it operates by scraping the Instagram website from the client side. Instagram (and most sites) forbid scraping tools like this. For future reference: Don’t use 3rd-party scraping tools on your social media accounts. They will generate thousands of API requests and trigger bot detection. You obviously didn’t intend for this to happen, but from the company’s perspective it’s equivalent to bot/scraper abuse.
- MikeUt 6y ago
  There's a big difference between scraping and posting. Companies putting both into the "bot" category is intentionally conflating the two, so they can ban user-empowering behavior (reading with unauthorized software, i.e. scraping) with the excuse that they were targeting spam and similar.
  - hctaw 6y ago
    Allowing third parties to collect user data without their knowledge is not "user empowering." Users agreed to Instagram having access to that data, not OP's company to collect it through instagram using a tool that collects who knows what and sends it who knows where.
    - MikeUt 6y ago
      Tech giants can spy all they want and sell that data to whoever they want, but letting others access data they can already see otherwise in a more convenient way would be intruding on privacy?
      - hctaw 6y ago
        It's about consent. A user gives explicit consent for a company like Instagram to have access to data. They don't give it to random third parties to scrape. And no, they can't sell it to whoever they want (or at least that's a reduction of how Facebook and Google use your data). They do monetize the data with their internal advertising platforms that they sell to people like OP, rather than letting anyone monetize the data without the knowledge or consent of their users.
        MikeUt 6y ago
        So users "explicitly consent" (as signaled by continued use of Instagram) to all of Instagram/Facebook's data collection, as well as to letting random third parties read their posts, as long as those random third parties don't automate that reading? That would be a step too far in privacy invasion? How convenient Facebook cares about privacy exactly when it's in their financial interest, and even more convenient all their users draw the exact same line.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
1. Try to build a business on top of a trans-national, for-profit conglomerate. 2. Do so without understanding the TOS, disclosed and, most dangerously, undisclosed. 3. ... 4. Profit? No, collapse. The internet services as represented by FAANG (throw in Oracle, Microsoft as well as Paypal and Ebay) are conceptually based on silo-and-moat building. Even youtube stars are starting to realize this. There's a reason why two trends are seeing a resurgence at the moment - the truly open internet and full-service-owned websites and platforms. One should not, and cannot afford to, use transnational conglomerate controlled platforms for building a small business.
- jnovek 6y ago
  Cool. Great. Platform effect sucks. ...But what, exactly, is OP supposed to do about it? What leverage do they have in the world to change the way things are? Realistically, when you’re building a startup, you use the tools you can get. Perhaps OP did not sufficient hedge across multiple engagement platforms but based on my experience, it’s very plausible that they tried multiple platforms and only found engagement on one. The action they were taking was even to better understand their underlying demographic, presumably to approach they demographic from other marketing vectors because platform effect sucks. Should OP simply ignore the opportunity because they haven’t been able to engage on another platform? The problem with a monopoly is precisely that the monopoly’s users don’t have a choice.
  - wishinghand 6y ago
    > what, exactly, is OP supposed to do about it? Don't do it twice. > What leverage do they have in the world to change the way things are? Provide platform agnostic services. I'm no friend or supporter of the massive FAANG companies, but the parent company of Instagram helped popularize the phrase, "move fast and break things." I would never start a business based on another business that espoused that motto.
    - jnovek 6y ago
      This response and the GP are so useless to OP. I suspect that OP has already learned quite a bit about platform effect and will carry those lessons with them forever. Further, posting this is certainly intended as both a warning to the wise and a call for help. Saying variations of “platform effect is bad” is simply repeating (with substantially less authority) what OP is already telling us. It’s punditry. Rather than repeating what we already know, do you have any ideas or advice on how OP can get out of their current pickle?
quickthrower2 6y ago
Lesson is multiple channels and capture email addresses. Good news is you could probably start again and attract the followers by advertising on Instagram. Given how much you were making I’d swallow pride and give it a go. But get their email addresses via an opt in form or something!
- OriolRoda 6y ago
  This we do.
pmarreck 6y ago
Fight. Fight like hell. Build your own way. I was just reading about how some youtubers who are doing quite well (like Linus Sebastian) are starting their own platforms which will get their content first, and then only later give it to YouTube https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55349255 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55349255 Here is his new project: https://www.floatplane.com/discover https://www.floatplane.com/discover
behnamoh 6y ago
Your whole business was on IG. Why would you use a tool to "analyze" your followers? To me, it seems like both you and IG are to blame. IG for acting like a monopoly; you for expecting other people's sympathy. You were already earning much more than most people and yet you got greedy. My data is my data not yours to collect. That is not how you respect your followers.
tootie 6y ago
There's probably a business opportunity here. Same way a handful of companies control the email marketing business by selling spam bucket avoidance, there's probably companies out there that will pay to keep their social media presence healthy. Charge marketers a monthly fee to own the relationships with Insta/Twitter/Google. Reputation insurance.
- tpetry 6y ago
  Someone should build a company i contact when something goes wrong! Like someone i call when one of the faang companies is blocking me who has many of friends at these companies who can get things done, like the monthly topic on hn when someone got blocked and only unblocked because they have a large fanbase.
- Tabular-Iceberg 6y ago
  What would those companies do for leverage against the platforms? Paying a fee to such a company is one thing, but I'd imagine having them force you and everyone else in their portfolio into a boycott of the platform would be a tough sell, especially as long as said portfolio is still too small to have an effect.
  - tootie 6y ago
    What leverage do email companies have? They do it by having enough scale to maintain a more personal relationship with the email providers (goog, ms, apple, aol, vz, etc). And it's not like Insta banned this guy because of some nefarious plot. They want people like him on his platform and want to be able to remedy accidental bans. They just suck at moderating. An intermediary can help them and they'd be glad to deal with them. They don't need leverage, just credibility.
burnte 6y ago
> This is the power of the big guys. This is the consequence of building a busines son someone else's property. This is the cost of not having a diverse source of new customers. IG could definitely responded better, but the outcome isn't their fault.
guessbest 6y ago
What's your business? Maybe someone at Facebook will show pity and clear up the situation for your business if you post the account name and link.
- OriolRoda 6y ago
  https://mhunters.com https://mhunters.com @mammothhunters (was the old account) fitness and nutrition
legohead 6y ago
Lawyer up if you want a real response. Letters from lawyers do magical things. Sounds like you were making enough money to warrant at least an attempt.
radley 6y ago
1. New HN account 2. What kind of real start-up was it that relied exclusively on IG to make sales? 3. Without real details, this looks suspiciously like a competitive social-media attack on InstagramHelperTools.
- jnovek 6y ago
  This is an interesting hypothesis. My (more general) hypothesis was that OP is posting under pseudonym because their actual business is something that wouldn’t be considered particularly virtuous on HN. Discrediting a competitor would certainly fit that idea. (Although the idea of finding engagement only on one platform at first doesn’t seem far-fetched to me at all.)
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    I understand them staying anonymous, but turning around and explicitly naming the service they used did raise an eyebrow.
- OriolRoda 6y ago
  We have more than one channel, but this one was one of the most importants. I posted the name of the service we used so that other people don't suffer the same fate we did. We are in the fitness business, so no interest in getting in any kind of marketing tool war.
  - radley 6y ago
    Adding a HN bio also helped, thanks.
jnovek 6y ago
As frustrating as this is 100% of problems I’ve encountered with Google or Facebook in my career have been solved with professional network connections into those companies. OP, I encourage you to examine your network and see if you are connected to FB in a useful way. If you have investors, use them. This is what they’re for. The only other method I’ve seen work is to make noise in the media and hope someone at Facebook/Google notices. It’s a total crapshoot but sometimes it seems to come out OK. I’m guessing that this post is an attempt at the latter. Edit: Oh, and, stop trying to analyze your users without their consent! You’d be surprised how giving early adopters are when you show them a little trust.
- ytNumbers 6y ago
  Has anyone with plenty of contacts at FAANG companies ever thought to leverage those contacts into a business? As in... Can't get a response from Google/Facebook, etc? Tell us (the helpful folks at WeHaveSomeCloutWithFBAndGoog.com) about your problem, and we'll get in touch with someone who can (hopefully) provide a remedy!
- OriolRoda 6y ago
  We were just look who, among our followers had more followers on their own so we could contact them and suggest an affiliate model for them. This information is available in their profile so we were not trying to sneak on anybody's data
  - jnovek 6y ago
    It’s not safe to assume that putting information into a profile means that they want it be utilized in a programmatic search or be collected off-site for marketing use. Users have a wide range of potential motivations for using IG. I know a good cross-section of startup founders and another cross-section of artists and the use-case and expectations for both groups is wildly different! Further, many IG users are simply using it as the latest iteration of Facebook. Scraping personal information — even if it’s exposed in their profile — might feel like a violation of the relationship they expect to have with a vendor in IG. This is just, like, my opinion, man.... and I don’t know if it can work for your business but if you find your way out of this mess I encourage you to look at it more from the perspective of users who engage heavily with you, not users who have the most leverage. A subset of your engaged users will also have a lot of leverage. You want your evangelists to evangelize because they really believe in you. You can manage a relationship with a small number of good evangelists personally rather than through a soulless mass E-Mail (or whatever medium you might use). A rev share (like you were trying to do) is great but you want to think about it like you’re supporting your key evangelists and reducing their friction in talking about what you’re working on. Best of luck! I hope you sort things out.
TheMagicHorsey 6y ago
My friend, you use a bot/scraper plugin and you wonder why they banned your account? If a plugin offers you something that is beyond what Instagram offers you, and it seems too good to be true ... its because it is.
carlesfe 6y ago
That sucks. As others have said, depending on a third party channel for sales is like putting most of your eggs on one basket. What is not clear for me is, doesn't Instagram have a customer support tier for accounts that big? I'm just a personal user but I would imagine that an account with 1000s of followers can speak with a person if something goes wrong? Scary
- OriolRoda 6y ago
  They don't
OriolRoda 6y ago
thanks a lot for the interest. As I mentioned in the main post we had an Instagram that over the years we build up to 37,000 followers, with more than 200 post (all unique content from us). The handle was: @mammothhunters Then we committed the mistake of using a service to check who was more influential among our users (this can be done manually, so no private info breached) that flagged us as a bot. Instagram first blocked our account. There's been no way to get in touch with them to recover the account. Finally we got a "tip" from an insider that the account was permanently deleted (we never got this message through the official channels). So we've lost 3 years of work. We started a new account 1 week ago (@mammoth.hunters) we've managed to recover 2,500 followers but we are far far far from where we were. The worse is that this was not only a show off channel. It was the main driver for one of our products that brings over 100k a year in revenues. Anybody has a tip on how to recover the old account? Thanks a lot!
nicgrev103 6y ago
I run a small photography business. A few years ago Facebook deleted a few fb events we had created with a few hundred attendees each. They never gave any reason for the deletion or any warning. Like you, we hit our heads against the support-brick-wall for a while. I estimated damages around £10k and filed a small claim against them. I used the EU small claims procedure which allowed me to sue FB Ireland from the UK, where I live. You must sue FB Ireland, I tried suing fb uk first and that was a lengthy and stressful mistake. I'm not sure what you will be able to do from the US if that is where you are based. Long story short they settled the matter out of court. I never got an explanation as to why the events were deleted. File a small claim, anyone can do it, it'll get their attention and they will probably pay you damages rather than argue the what and the why of your case.
- OriolRoda 6y ago
  Can you give me advise on how to do it?
  - nicgrev103 6y ago
    Sure! caveat: I am not a lawyer and this is not professional legal advice. I looked up your ig and it looks like you are based in Spain? If so you can use the EU small claims process just as I did. The claim will be capped at EUR 5,000 (not including expenses, you should include expenses such as your time to make the claim, this can be over the 5,000) So it's a small amount but may get their attention. You should write a 'Letter Before Claim' to Facebook Ireland (IG terms The Instagram Service is one of the Facebook Products, provided to you by Facebook Ireland Limited. These Terms of Use therefore constitute an agreement between you and Facebook Ireland Limited.) This letter should outline your claim and include all evidence you have to support your claim. You can find out more here: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-courts/legal-system/small-claims/making-a-small-claim/ https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-courts/legal-syste... If they fail to respond in 14 days you will need to file your claim with the small claims court in Ireland, they are quite helpful and answer the phone and emails. You can find out more here: https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_small_claims-42-en.do https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_small_claims-42-en.do
always_left 6y ago
I feel like an appropriate title would be "I used a third-party service on Instagram and got banned"
rchaud 6y ago
If users are buying products through Instagram, then IG takes a cut, does it not? So you should have a business account of some kind that gives you access to customer support.
- dante_dev 6y ago
  Not necessarily. you could use their ad network or just use your instagram account like anyone does posting images\stories
hgo 6y ago
Please stop saying that "this happens when you rely on big-tech". This is one data-point, obviously incredibly unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear about yet another story amongst the many we probably never hear about in this community. Using one anectodal story to say "I told you so" to a stranger, is not very constructive. Obviously it makes sense to use the platforms that Youtube, et. al. provides to build a business. We can surely point to several examples where it has payed off. We can also point to real efforts to reduce the risk exposure of relying on them. Instead of saying "Don't use Youtube", what would you suggest to use instead, that has real reach and is suitable for a new business?
OriolRoda 6y ago
Just to be clear: Our business does not rely solely on Instagram. We have a website with over 5MM visits/year, a YouTube channel with over 30k followers and few millions visualizations. However Instagram (and FB) are HUGE in the fitness and nutrition world. We had post with several thousand likes and comments that we used as ads to drive traffic to our Free products. We have spent more than 100,000$ in ads over the years. So our Instagram account was like a big premium billboard. All gone.
Animats 6y ago
“The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).
true_religion 6y ago
If you build a business on top of another business you have to ask yourself how you are specifically helping them profit. Business relationships are supposed to be about mutual profit, so if you are simply using them to make money they’ll eventually cut you off.

92 points by OriolRoda 6y ago

fsflover 6y ago

I hope more people abandon the monopolies and consider federated networks instead. In this case, Pixelfed.

standardUser 6y ago
I can't see alternatives like that catching on unless there was a platform to combine them with the existing, dominant platforms. And I can't imagine the existing platforms allowing their systems to be used by a 3rd party in that way.
- fsflover 6y ago
  AFAIK GDPR requires interoperability.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

The tool you used appears to be a browser plug-in, meaning it operates by scraping the Instagram website from the client side. Instagram (and most sites) forbid scraping tools like this. For future reference: Don’t use 3rd-party scraping tools on your social media accounts. They will generate thousands of API requests and trigger bot detection. You obviously didn’t intend for this to happen, but from the company’s perspective it’s equivalent to bot/scraper abuse.

MikeUt 6y ago
There's a big difference between scraping and posting. Companies putting both into the "bot" category is intentionally conflating the two, so they can ban user-empowering behavior (reading with unauthorized software, i.e. scraping) with the excuse that they were targeting spam and similar.
- hctaw 6y ago
  Allowing third parties to collect user data without their knowledge is not "user empowering." Users agreed to Instagram having access to that data, not OP's company to collect it through instagram using a tool that collects who knows what and sends it who knows where.
  - MikeUt 6y ago
    Tech giants can spy all they want and sell that data to whoever they want, but letting others access data they can already see otherwise in a more convenient way would be intruding on privacy?
    - hctaw 6y ago
      It's about consent. A user gives explicit consent for a company like Instagram to have access to data. They don't give it to random third parties to scrape. And no, they can't sell it to whoever they want (or at least that's a reduction of how Facebook and Google use your data). They do monetize the data with their internal advertising platforms that they sell to people like OP, rather than letting anyone monetize the data without the knowledge or consent of their users.
      - MikeUt 6y ago
        So users "explicitly consent" (as signaled by continued use of Instagram) to all of Instagram/Facebook's data collection, as well as to letting random third parties read their posts, as long as those random third parties don't automate that reading? That would be a step too far in privacy invasion? How convenient Facebook cares about privacy exactly when it's in their financial interest, and even more convenient all their users draw the exact same line.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago

1. Try to build a business on top of a trans-national, for-profit conglomerate. 2. Do so without understanding the TOS, disclosed and, most dangerously, undisclosed. 3. ... 4. Profit? No, collapse. The internet services as represented by FAANG (throw in Oracle, Microsoft as well as Paypal and Ebay) are conceptually based on silo-and-moat building. Even youtube stars are starting to realize this. There's a reason why two trends are seeing a resurgence at the moment - the truly open internet and full-service-owned websites and platforms. One should not, and cannot afford to, use transnational conglomerate controlled platforms for building a small business.

jnovek 6y ago
Cool. Great. Platform effect sucks. ...But what, exactly, is OP supposed to do about it? What leverage do they have in the world to change the way things are? Realistically, when you’re building a startup, you use the tools you can get. Perhaps OP did not sufficient hedge across multiple engagement platforms but based on my experience, it’s very plausible that they tried multiple platforms and only found engagement on one. The action they were taking was even to better understand their underlying demographic, presumably to approach they demographic from other marketing vectors because platform effect sucks. Should OP simply ignore the opportunity because they haven’t been able to engage on another platform? The problem with a monopoly is precisely that the monopoly’s users don’t have a choice.
- wishinghand 6y ago
  > what, exactly, is OP supposed to do about it? Don't do it twice. > What leverage do they have in the world to change the way things are? Provide platform agnostic services. I'm no friend or supporter of the massive FAANG companies, but the parent company of Instagram helped popularize the phrase, "move fast and break things." I would never start a business based on another business that espoused that motto.
  - jnovek 6y ago
    This response and the GP are so useless to OP. I suspect that OP has already learned quite a bit about platform effect and will carry those lessons with them forever. Further, posting this is certainly intended as both a warning to the wise and a call for help. Saying variations of “platform effect is bad” is simply repeating (with substantially less authority) what OP is already telling us. It’s punditry. Rather than repeating what we already know, do you have any ideas or advice on how OP can get out of their current pickle?

quickthrower2 6y ago

Lesson is multiple channels and capture email addresses. Good news is you could probably start again and attract the followers by advertising on Instagram. Given how much you were making I’d swallow pride and give it a go. But get their email addresses via an opt in form or something!

OriolRoda 6y ago
This we do.

pmarreck 6y ago

Fight. Fight like hell. Build your own way. I was just reading about how some youtubers who are doing quite well (like Linus Sebastian) are starting their own platforms which will get their content first, and then only later give it to YouTube https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55349255 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55349255 Here is his new project: https://www.floatplane.com/discover https://www.floatplane.com/discover

behnamoh 6y ago

Your whole business was on IG. Why would you use a tool to "analyze" your followers? To me, it seems like both you and IG are to blame. IG for acting like a monopoly; you for expecting other people's sympathy. You were already earning much more than most people and yet you got greedy. My data is my data not yours to collect. That is not how you respect your followers.

tootie 6y ago

There's probably a business opportunity here. Same way a handful of companies control the email marketing business by selling spam bucket avoidance, there's probably companies out there that will pay to keep their social media presence healthy. Charge marketers a monthly fee to own the relationships with Insta/Twitter/Google. Reputation insurance.

tpetry 6y ago
Someone should build a company i contact when something goes wrong! Like someone i call when one of the faang companies is blocking me who has many of friends at these companies who can get things done, like the monthly topic on hn when someone got blocked and only unblocked because they have a large fanbase.
Tabular-Iceberg 6y ago
What would those companies do for leverage against the platforms? Paying a fee to such a company is one thing, but I'd imagine having them force you and everyone else in their portfolio into a boycott of the platform would be a tough sell, especially as long as said portfolio is still too small to have an effect.
- tootie 6y ago
  What leverage do email companies have? They do it by having enough scale to maintain a more personal relationship with the email providers (goog, ms, apple, aol, vz, etc). And it's not like Insta banned this guy because of some nefarious plot. They want people like him on his platform and want to be able to remedy accidental bans. They just suck at moderating. An intermediary can help them and they'd be glad to deal with them. They don't need leverage, just credibility.

burnte 6y ago

> This is the power of the big guys. This is the consequence of building a busines son someone else's property. This is the cost of not having a diverse source of new customers. IG could definitely responded better, but the outcome isn't their fault.

guessbest 6y ago

What's your business? Maybe someone at Facebook will show pity and clear up the situation for your business if you post the account name and link.

OriolRoda 6y ago
https://mhunters.com https://mhunters.com @mammothhunters (was the old account) fitness and nutrition

legohead 6y ago

Lawyer up if you want a real response. Letters from lawyers do magical things. Sounds like you were making enough money to warrant at least an attempt.

radley 6y ago

1. New HN account 2. What kind of real start-up was it that relied exclusively on IG to make sales? 3. Without real details, this looks suspiciously like a competitive social-media attack on InstagramHelperTools.

jnovek 6y ago
This is an interesting hypothesis. My (more general) hypothesis was that OP is posting under pseudonym because their actual business is something that wouldn’t be considered particularly virtuous on HN. Discrediting a competitor would certainly fit that idea. (Although the idea of finding engagement only on one platform at first doesn’t seem far-fetched to me at all.)
- bdcravens 6y ago
  I understand them staying anonymous, but turning around and explicitly naming the service they used did raise an eyebrow.
OriolRoda 6y ago
We have more than one channel, but this one was one of the most importants. I posted the name of the service we used so that other people don't suffer the same fate we did. We are in the fitness business, so no interest in getting in any kind of marketing tool war.
- radley 6y ago
  Adding a HN bio also helped, thanks.

jnovek 6y ago

As frustrating as this is 100% of problems I’ve encountered with Google or Facebook in my career have been solved with professional network connections into those companies. OP, I encourage you to examine your network and see if you are connected to FB in a useful way. If you have investors, use them. This is what they’re for. The only other method I’ve seen work is to make noise in the media and hope someone at Facebook/Google notices. It’s a total crapshoot but sometimes it seems to come out OK. I’m guessing that this post is an attempt at the latter. Edit: Oh, and, stop trying to analyze your users without their consent! You’d be surprised how giving early adopters are when you show them a little trust.

ytNumbers 6y ago
Has anyone with plenty of contacts at FAANG companies ever thought to leverage those contacts into a business? As in... Can't get a response from Google/Facebook, etc? Tell us (the helpful folks at WeHaveSomeCloutWithFBAndGoog.com) about your problem, and we'll get in touch with someone who can (hopefully) provide a remedy!
OriolRoda 6y ago
We were just look who, among our followers had more followers on their own so we could contact them and suggest an affiliate model for them. This information is available in their profile so we were not trying to sneak on anybody's data
- jnovek 6y ago
  It’s not safe to assume that putting information into a profile means that they want it be utilized in a programmatic search or be collected off-site for marketing use. Users have a wide range of potential motivations for using IG. I know a good cross-section of startup founders and another cross-section of artists and the use-case and expectations for both groups is wildly different! Further, many IG users are simply using it as the latest iteration of Facebook. Scraping personal information — even if it’s exposed in their profile — might feel like a violation of the relationship they expect to have with a vendor in IG. This is just, like, my opinion, man.... and I don’t know if it can work for your business but if you find your way out of this mess I encourage you to look at it more from the perspective of users who engage heavily with you, not users who have the most leverage. A subset of your engaged users will also have a lot of leverage. You want your evangelists to evangelize because they really believe in you. You can manage a relationship with a small number of good evangelists personally rather than through a soulless mass E-Mail (or whatever medium you might use). A rev share (like you were trying to do) is great but you want to think about it like you’re supporting your key evangelists and reducing their friction in talking about what you’re working on. Best of luck! I hope you sort things out.

TheMagicHorsey 6y ago

My friend, you use a bot/scraper plugin and you wonder why they banned your account? If a plugin offers you something that is beyond what Instagram offers you, and it seems too good to be true ... its because it is.

carlesfe 6y ago

That sucks. As others have said, depending on a third party channel for sales is like putting most of your eggs on one basket. What is not clear for me is, doesn't Instagram have a customer support tier for accounts that big? I'm just a personal user but I would imagine that an account with 1000s of followers can speak with a person if something goes wrong? Scary

OriolRoda 6y ago
They don't

OriolRoda 6y ago

thanks a lot for the interest. As I mentioned in the main post we had an Instagram that over the years we build up to 37,000 followers, with more than 200 post (all unique content from us). The handle was: @mammothhunters Then we committed the mistake of using a service to check who was more influential among our users (this can be done manually, so no private info breached) that flagged us as a bot. Instagram first blocked our account. There's been no way to get in touch with them to recover the account. Finally we got a "tip" from an insider that the account was permanently deleted (we never got this message through the official channels). So we've lost 3 years of work. We started a new account 1 week ago (@mammoth.hunters) we've managed to recover 2,500 followers but we are far far far from where we were. The worse is that this was not only a show off channel. It was the main driver for one of our products that brings over 100k a year in revenues. Anybody has a tip on how to recover the old account? Thanks a lot!

nicgrev103 6y ago

I run a small photography business. A few years ago Facebook deleted a few fb events we had created with a few hundred attendees each. They never gave any reason for the deletion or any warning. Like you, we hit our heads against the support-brick-wall for a while. I estimated damages around £10k and filed a small claim against them. I used the EU small claims procedure which allowed me to sue FB Ireland from the UK, where I live. You must sue FB Ireland, I tried suing fb uk first and that was a lengthy and stressful mistake. I'm not sure what you will be able to do from the US if that is where you are based. Long story short they settled the matter out of court. I never got an explanation as to why the events were deleted. File a small claim, anyone can do it, it'll get their attention and they will probably pay you damages rather than argue the what and the why of your case.

OriolRoda 6y ago
Can you give me advise on how to do it?
- nicgrev103 6y ago
  Sure! caveat: I am not a lawyer and this is not professional legal advice. I looked up your ig and it looks like you are based in Spain? If so you can use the EU small claims process just as I did. The claim will be capped at EUR 5,000 (not including expenses, you should include expenses such as your time to make the claim, this can be over the 5,000) So it's a small amount but may get their attention. You should write a 'Letter Before Claim' to Facebook Ireland (IG terms The Instagram Service is one of the Facebook Products, provided to you by Facebook Ireland Limited. These Terms of Use therefore constitute an agreement between you and Facebook Ireland Limited.) This letter should outline your claim and include all evidence you have to support your claim. You can find out more here: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-courts/legal-system/small-claims/making-a-small-claim/ https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-courts/legal-syste... If they fail to respond in 14 days you will need to file your claim with the small claims court in Ireland, they are quite helpful and answer the phone and emails. You can find out more here: https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_small_claims-42-en.do https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_small_claims-42-en.do

always_left 6y ago

I feel like an appropriate title would be "I used a third-party service on Instagram and got banned"

rchaud 6y ago

If users are buying products through Instagram, then IG takes a cut, does it not? So you should have a business account of some kind that gives you access to customer support.

dante_dev 6y ago
Not necessarily. you could use their ad network or just use your instagram account like anyone does posting images\stories

hgo 6y ago

Please stop saying that "this happens when you rely on big-tech". This is one data-point, obviously incredibly unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear about yet another story amongst the many we probably never hear about in this community. Using one anectodal story to say "I told you so" to a stranger, is not very constructive. Obviously it makes sense to use the platforms that Youtube, et. al. provides to build a business. We can surely point to several examples where it has payed off. We can also point to real efforts to reduce the risk exposure of relying on them. Instead of saying "Don't use Youtube", what would you suggest to use instead, that has real reach and is suitable for a new business?

OriolRoda 6y ago

Just to be clear: Our business does not rely solely on Instagram. We have a website with over 5MM visits/year, a YouTube channel with over 30k followers and few millions visualizations. However Instagram (and FB) are HUGE in the fitness and nutrition world. We had post with several thousand likes and comments that we used as ads to drive traffic to our Free products. We have spent more than 100,000$ in ads over the years. So our Instagram account was like a big premium billboard. All gone.

Animats 6y ago

“The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).

true_religion 6y ago

If you build a business on top of another business you have to ask yourself how you are specifically helping them profit. Business relationships are supposed to be about mutual profit, so if you are simply using them to make money they’ll eventually cut you off.