Adventures in Meta Land: A Lesson in Frustration and Stupidity
Running $150 of Instagram ads turned into a frustrating maze of account flags, Meta support, and my own mistakes—like an old auto-reply telling potential clients we were out of business. A tough lesson in both Meta’s complexity and my own oversight."
Advertising is already expensive, but sometimes we do things in a certain way that make it even more costly. Sometimes it’s just pure stupidity that increases our cost of client acquisition.
I recently ran some ads on META (formerly Facebook), more specifically on Instagram, with a total budget of around $150. I got one promising client, but they didn’t move forward, and overall, it was a horrible experience. I hadn’t run ads in a while, and my Instagram account for woodworking had been mostly stagnant. My account ended up being flagged due to “unusual activity.”
Every time I submitted a review of my case, they allowed me to run ads again, only for my account to be blocked a few minutes later. I ended up buying the META verification badge ($8.00) just to get a hold of a human representative, probably the most appealing feature they offer, which isn’t saying much.
To their credit, they were responsive, and for the first time in years, I spoke to actual Facebook staff about my account. In fact, they even called me! But at the end of the day, all that goodwill went down the drain because they still couldn’t fix the problem.
From what I gather, the issue is mostly due to two things. First, they use some sort of AI to review these accounts, and an error in their system sees my two ad accounts as conflicting. Second, they created a new ad account for my Instagram, which is exactly what I hate about relying on companies like META.
META, especially since the early Facebook years, has forced users to create various pages, ad managers, business portfolios, etc. I didn’t want all that, but if I wanted to run ads, I needed them. So now, I’m stuck with a maze of interconnected accounts that I don’t fully understand. It’s yet another reason not to let companies like META control your business growth. I’m hoping that the NOSTR protocol will really revolutionize social media—it's something we desperately need.
Now, on the topic of stupidity... this one was my fault. Apparently, I had set up some instant responses for anyone who started a conversation with me. Just opening a conversation would trigger a message saying, “We are no longer in business.” This was from 2022 when we were closing the shop. You can imagine why I didn’t get any direct messages from the small ads I ran... Oh well.
Hopefully, soon I can share the end of the story, and hopefully, it will be good!
Until next time,
Javier