Professional online marketers are warning that Meta Business Manager, Facebook pages, and Facebook Advertising accounts are very vulnerable to hacking and theft, but if you lose control of your business account or page, good luck getting it back from the social media giant.
Facebook generally has a reputation for poor customer service, but most would not expect that the slow responses and infuriating non-answers would be extended to business customers. However, digital marketers have revealed that loss of Facebook assets including business manager accounts, pages, and advertising accounts, is common. Reasons include hacking, people deleting personal Facebook profiles, and – more common than you’d expect – disgruntled staff locking their former employers out.
Dean Cvetkoski, a professional digital marketer, says that they had their business manager hacked last year – despite having all the security protocols and two factor authentication turned on.
“Everyone had two factor authentication.”
“So what’s going on with Facebook security that our accounts could be hacked even with two factor authentication turned on?”
Dean said they reached out to Meta straight away to tell them that they hacked, but it took nine months to get the business manager back, and they still have not been able to get the ad accounts back.
“I had Meta verified at the time, which should get you extra support, but that premium support was absolutely useless.”
Dean says that rather than fixing the problem, Meta made things worse by locking all their client’s ad accounts.
“Some of those clients were also verified business pages.”
“All of our clients were affected by it, their ad accounts were blocked, and we couldn’t make new ones.”
The clients affected by hacking Dean’s account had amassed a great deal of data over time and had significantly optimised their advertising, and were directly financially affected. Over 60 accounts, representing around a million dollars in advertising, were lost.
“To this day, the access to the ad accounts has not been restored.”
“So I had clients that had optimised their accounts and all their custom audiences to the point they were getting 50 cents a click or really cheap conversions and click-throughs, and they lost the lot.”
“Our business suffered severely from it.”
Dean says they had to send legal letters to get the Business Manager restored, but it was too late, with many clients lost and the business needing to pivot away from Facebook marketing to survive.
The issue came to light when a locally led patient group, which we can’t name for legal reasons, reached out to a number of professional digital marketers for assistance. The volunteer organisation has been blocked from its page and over 30 groups since January, and months of emailing to Facebook Support has only resulted in frustration.
The lengthy email exchanges between the patient group and Facebook are remarkably similar to the exchanges between Dean and the social media giant. Most of the messages are formulaic copy-and-paste responses that say the ‘Internal Team’ is working on it.
Many of the exchanges are also contradictory, with clear communications that the issue was resolved and then, often within hours or sometimes minutes, another communication from the company that the matter couldn’t be resolved and the assets would not be restored.
And for both the big marketing company and the small charity, Facebook repeatedly closed the support ticket without any resolution, instructing them to create new ticket.
Facebook/Meta was asked to comment for this story several times, including a very straight forward question of ‘what is the internal team’, but did not provide an answer.
Kate, a volunteer with the local patient group, says the recent months have been very difficult for many thousands of people who rely on the small charity’s support groups.
“I understand that it is not Facebook’s fault that this situation happened, but I really thought it would have been resolved by now.”
“We are all very sick people, we don’t have a lot of capacity to deal with added stress, and it’s unbelievably stressful to see the page just dead or our support groups paused.”
“We rely on the organisation to notify us of things like issues with availability in our medication, and the support groups to connect with others who understand.”
The board of the patient body declined to comment on the issue with their Facebook assets, other than to clarify that they were not hacked, and they are still working on the problem, but as there are now lawyers involved they asked that the organisatiom was not identified.
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