Like many other businesses, we LOVE social media. Platforms that enable us to communicate on all levels with our followers. Over the last 8 years of Caravanning with Kids, we have built a community of wonderful caravanners, campers and travellers who look to us for advice and inspiration.
We LOVE Instagram!
We LOVE Pinterest!
We LOVE Facebook!
We LOVE Facebook Groups!
We even LOVE TikTok!
However, WE DO NOT OWN ANY OF THIS CONTENT! More on this point below…
Our following on our main Instagram account nearly hit 20,000 and it was filled with not only our own family adventures, but it told the story of our business from the very beginning and had all the wonderful inspiration we shared from thousands of travelling families. Eight years of our lives & our business LOST (probably forever!) in a heartbeat!
We were overwhelmed by the support from caravanners and the industry when this happened and we quickly set up a NEW (backup) account – just incase we can’t get our original account back – you can follow it here:
How did this happen?
We were inundated with messages from our community…
“WTF! That is shocking…”
“Did you have TFA?”…TFA = Two Factor Authorisation – everyone should activate this!
“Did you get hacked?”…
“How can I stop this from happening to us?…
A bit of back story for you – I am also the owner of a training organisation and we have been delivering programs in social media for businesses for over 10 years and we have worked around compliance, engagement, customer service, sales & marketing for nearly 30 years. (I know…I really don’t look that old! haha)
So, when it comes to security settings and managing social media accounts, we are pretty strict and follow all the rules. We have seen many accounts compromised over the years and some of our own clients have lost everything as well.
There are two main ways things can go wrong:
- Your account can get hacked!
- Instagram/Facebook/Meta can make a mistake!
Both are just has crap as eachother. However, you have more of a chance recovered your account if you are hacked, versus Meta disabling your account by mistake.
If you get hacked, you need to PROVE that you own the account, so follow the instructions given to you – 2022 has seen some massive improvements to this system after a nightmare 2 years of hackers getting into millions of accounts.
What happening to the Caravanning with Kids Account?
We can only speculate on this one: We have Two Factor Authorisation set up, however, in this instance, this obviously didn’t make a cracker of a difference.
Initially our account was flagged as SUSPENDED – this usually results in a 24-48 hour ban and accounts are generally reactivated once you submit “This is a Mistake”. At this point, the team were not worried, we had seen this happen before and were very hopeful that our account would come back within days.
Why was it SUSPENDED? There are a bunch of reasons why an account is suspended, sometimes referred to as Insta Jail. Instagram flag these types of things as suspicious behaviour:
- Multiple failed attempts with a password – We had a new social media content creator login to our account the night before suspension – this was the only ‘different’ behaviour from our account.
- Login errors
- Excessive follows, comments ( hahaha – we struggle to reply to all the comments from our followers…eeeek!)
This is why many HACKED accounts are suspended very quickly.
A few days after our account was SUSPENDED – it was then adjusted to DISABLED – What the…! I was now officially concerned.
Disabled? This happens when an account does not follow Community Guidelines or Terms of Use. If you have followed along via our Facebook, Website or Insta for the last 8 years, you will know that we are about as vanilla as it gets and as industry members, we are known as Switzerland! How could we have broken the rules? There were no nudie shots & we never post political or social views…
We work with many agencies and were able to tap in directly to some very knowledgeable tech heads. Much to our horror, there was nothing they could do either.
Apparently there are MILLIONS of Instagram accounts that are disabled by MISTAKE every week. Yup, you read that right – MILLIONS.
Were we hacked?
If we were, the hackers must have done something very wrong within minutes (we have a dedicated team who live in our social accounts) – by doing this, they have then set off a chain reaction which has resulted in our account being disabled.
Or – Was it a mistake?
This is highly likely, given the figures given from Meta & Instagram. We also had not other accounts or emails compromised across all our platforms and staff members.
We believe we were simply UNLUCKY!
This sucks – not only from a business point of view (although we are very thankful that our SHOP Adventure Awaits Insta is still there…) but for all our own caravanning adventures and memories.
The key lesson here for EVERYONE that holds their social accounts close to their heart or runs an account for business is:
WE DO NOT OWN THIS CONTENT…
IT CAN BE TAKEN AWAY FROM US AT ANY TIME…
If you are a business – you OWN your website & subscriber lists – we are lucky that we are not reliant on social media for our business – our websites & emails are our core. However, we know many businesses in the caravanning & camping space that would be devastated if they lost their social accounts, it would ruin their business.
BACK UP YOUR CONTENT... in recent years, Instagram have made this much easier to do… simply google “How to Backup my Instagram Account” Unfortunately, this was not done for our CWK account.
If you have any questions – please don’t hesitate to reach out – we are always here to help.
*update – our original account is still LOST… We are logging reports and appeals every week and continue to HOPE that one day we will get it back…. THANK YOU again for everyones support…
Happy & Safe Travels – Adele, Wayne, Ashlee & Kate xx
