By If you read my email from a few weeks ago, you’ll know that Facebook had randomly decided that my www.michaelwilding.com blog was malicious or abusive.
No idea why.
It had been fine for nearly a decade. Then suddenly, one morning, I could no longer post links to my site.
I spent ages on Google, and tried everything I found.
No luck.
I tried contacting Facebook.
No luck.
What the hell do you do in a situation like this?
You’re communicating with a faceless organisation who send stock replies without actually reading your messages.
A reader, Joshua, also got in touch with me saying the same thing had happened to him, and he’d got nowhere.
And then… he said something that got me thinking.
I went into the business manager for Facebook, and guess what?
They have a live support chat for their advertising.
Holy mother of god, I can actually speak to a real person.
Not only that, but a nice person, who knew what they were talking about.
The issue got escalated, and I was promised an email within the next 48 hours.
Expecting very little from it, I was shocked to find an email in the next few hours telling me that the listing was an error and had now been removed.
That’s possibly the first good, and it really was good, interaction I’ve ever had with Facebook support.
The secret?
Use their business advertising support chat.
Of course, the question is why did it happen to start with!
Facebook claim it was an error.
Me… I don’t think it was.
Just a few days before the block, I’d moved my DNS to CloudFlare and was using one of their free SSL certificates.
These certificates are shared amongst many users, which is why they’re free.
A few years ago Facebook was rejecting these SSL certificates as malicious.
However, due to the lack of IP addresses in the world, most SSL certificates are now shared.
What I think happened is… I moved to CloudFlare and my SSL changed from a dedicated one to a shared one. This flagged a warning in Facebook’s system and I got blocked.
Since having everything cleared and working again, I’ve purchased a dedicated SSL certificate through CloudFlare and have had no problems.
Was it the free SSL certificate they offered, or was it Facebook making a mistake?
Ultimately I’ll never know, but the issue is resolved.
What this highlights is that if your main assets are held by another company (e.g. a Facebook page) then at any time your business could dissappear over night.
Make sure that you are always in control of your core business.
Over and out,
Michael
What do you think?