If you’re a blogger or influencer, chances are the thought of having your Instagram account deleted without warning is the stuff of nightmares. We’ve heard before about how important it is to not rely on your Instagram (one of the reasons I’ve built a blogging newletter and blogs too) but there’s no denying that Instagram is instrumental in making a career out of blogging.
So what about if you do that, grow a platform and it gets deleted without warning?
We’ve heard the odd case of accounts being deleted for obvious spammy behaviour or being hacked, but have been reassured that as long as we turn our two factor authentication on and don’t suddenly buy a 1000 followers from Rusia, we’ll be fine.
However, recently it seems a wave of influencers are getting their accounts deleted by Instagram for no reason at all. I spoke to a few of them…
Chloe blogs at Life with the Busbys originally ran the Instagram @lifewiththebusbys and had reached 20,000 followers. For Chloe, Instagram was her job and she teamed up with a small business to run a giveaway for personalised bottles, just like the thousands of giveaways we see in the platform each day.
“My giveaway was ending at 7pm and at 2pm a fake account was created pretending to be-I reported it and then by 6pm both me and the fake account was disabled. I have filled in numerous forms; I was asked for ID and they said it was a mistake. I’ve received that email 8 times since Wednesday, asked to send a photo with a code twice, contacted them through Facebook Business Support but now heard nothing. It’s been a week” Chloe also had her two factor authentication switched on to supposedly prevent this kind of thing from happening.
Vicky, who runs @craftymumofgirls_had an identical thing happen to her.
“I was running a giveaway and a spam account mirroring mine came up with my pic, my bio and last nine posts. It was messaging people saying they had won my giveaway and was giving them a link to click. Someone messaged me to tell me so I put it in my stories and asked people to block and report. A day later the spam account disappeared and my app went blank; I tried to log in and it said my account would be deleted within 14 days. I appealed and filled out numerous forms but on the 2nd of October, my account started to disappear and now it says user not known. I had 11,000 followers.”
You might think the solution is to not run giveaways on the platform but I also spoke to Codie, who found her account blocked for no reason at all.
” My account got blocked out of the blue with no warning; I hadn’t done a giveaway and had done nothing to violate Instagram’s terms and conditions. I had to send a report off and then an email asking for a photo holding up a code. I didn’t receive an email or update but about 40 hours later my friend messaged me to say she was able to tag me and I realised I could log in.” Codie followed the advice she was given from Chloe but despite following identical procedures, Codie got hers back and Chloe didn’t.
No, Instagram doesn’t say it will ban all people who run giveaways. In their terms and conditions which will begin from the 20th of December, Instagram says: “Don’t offer money or giveaways of money in exchange for likes follows or shares.” so a money giveaway is against their terms and conditions.
They have recently published guidelines about the kind of content they recommend and push out on their platform; stating “content that users broadly tell us they dislike…” and lists “content that promotes a giveaway. From this, we can likely imply that giveaways are not liked by Instagram users and because of that, Instagram may not recommend that content through things like the explore page or hashtag. It does not say it will ban all users who run giveaways.
However, we do know from the examples given that running a giveaway does increase your risk of a spam account being created which contacts your followers. Some of you have got in touch to say this happened to you and you didn’t lose your account and others have said they did. Whether this is due to luck or other factors (such as instagram taking into account whether an account does lots of giveaways or this is the first one for example; or they have a strike against you for unnatural behaviour already) we can only attempt to guess.
It’s up to you whether you do a giveaway or not and I’m not saying everyone who does one will be banned.
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