Over the last 12 months alone, Meta (formerly Facebook) has become a whole different beast. And yet, despite being a global business that prides itself on “connecting people”, it has failed to communicate a lot of these changes to its users. This has led to tens of thousands of people being randomly locked out of their own accounts or banned from advertising for violating policies that it also chooses not to specify.
In this article, I’m going to guide you through exactly what you need to do to avoid this happening to you, and how you can potentially get off their naughty list if this has happened to you already:
Step 1
Set up Two Factor Authentication (2FA) for your Meta account. This reduces the chance of anyone hacking into your account and doing anything dodgy, which could lead to you being permanently banned from the platform. My recommendation is to download the Google Authenticator app, which will send you a 6 digit code for Meta each time you try to log in. It might seem annoying, but it will save you massive headaches in the long run.
Step 2
Set up a Business Manager account by going to business.facebook.com. This is the management hub that will own all of your assets. Once this is created, head to your Business Settings where you’ll be able to create new, or “claim” existing Pages, Instagram Accounts, Ad Accounts, Domains and Pixels into here.
Step 3
This is an important one. In your Business Settings under People, you’ll be able to add another Admin here. Make sure you do this. Having at least 2 admins is a safety net in case one of you does get hacked or banned, and means you won’t lose access to your Business assets. Please ensure any other admins also have 2FA set up too.
Step 4
Also in your Business Settings under Brand Safety, you’ll see Domains. Click Add and enter your website URL here. It will provide you with a little snippet of code to add to your website or hosting. Send this to your web developer to implement if you are not comfortable doing this. Once this has been done, come back and click Verify. If it’s been done correctly, it will say “Connected”.
If you need to contact the Meta team to raise an issue, you can do so here where you’ll see a Contact Support button at the bottom of the page. As many of you will likely already know, Meta’s live chat “support” is, at best, frustrating, and at worst, soul-crushingly incompetent. But by setting these foundations in place to prove your identity and the ownership of your business, it gives you a much better chance of being able to get back into your accounts should anything bad happen.
As a final point, please make sure YOU create and own all of your assets. I know it’s tempting to ask someone else to set these things up, but in doing so, you could be handing over digital ownership of all your pages, ad accounts and pixels to a third party. Once you’ve done that, it’s very difficult to get them back, which means you’re going to spend weeks, if not months, trying to track down ex-partners, ex-employees, or ex-agencies and asking them to relinquish control of your business. In some cases, we’ve seen businesses fail to manage this, and after spending hundreds of thousands of pounds gathering data into a tracking pixel they don’t own, they’re forced to start again from square one.
So whilst this whole process might seem like a bit of a faff, taking 15-20mins to set it all up correctly is one of the single most important things you can do to protect your business, your data and your bottom line.
