Missing Facebook Pages: What to Do When Facebook Takes Your Page Away

Do you know what to do if your Facebook page vanishes?

Want to be ready when and if that day comes?

To share what happened when the Social Media Examiner Facebook page disappeared and how we handled it, keep reading.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I am joined by Erik Fisher, community manager of Social Media Examiner.

Erik and I will explore what happened when our Facebook page disappeared.

You'll discover what to do if the same thing happens to you.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
How Our Page Disappeared and What We Did About It
Finding out

On a late Sunday afternoon with my home filled with kids and cousins and my wife cooking dinner, I eased into the couch to watch a football game. Since I drained the battery playing with my new iPhone, it was charging in another room when a text message came at 4:12 PM: “We have a bit of an emergency. Our Facebook page is missing. You around?” I had missed the text.

The phone rang 12 minutes later, and my wife picked it up. Our community manager Erik Fisher was calling to tell me what happened. Between the time he texted me and when he called, Erik poked around Facebook and confirmed it. The Social Media Examiner Facebook page had disappeared.

And I mean it was really gone. I even received a notification that my personal profile was incomplete because it didn’t list where I worked.

I checked to see if I could view the page on mobile or on my laptop, if I could get into the admin side of the page and if the Facebook Fan widget appeared on our site. The answer for everything: no.

Listen to the show to learn why it's important to instruct your team to call you in an emergency situation.

First thoughts

Initially, I thought we’d been hacked. Then I recalled how after I did the Chalene Johnson story we'd taken all the steps necessary to secure the accounts of all of our staff.

We secured email with 2-step authentication to our corporate Gmail accounts and we turned on Facebook Login Approvals. Plus, we recently completed a security audit of everyone on our team, and have a master document of who has administrative access to what. These are all steps you can take to secure your business accounts, and you can hear more about how to implement them in the podcast.

Listen to the show to hear our thoughts about "what if" the page was gone permanently.

First steps

After I got off the phone with Erik, everything around me faded into the background. Within minutes I posted the following to friends only:

Ok friends, our Social Media Examiner Facebook page has fully disappeared from existence? Anyone have any suggestions on what to do?

Posted by Michael Stelzner on Sunday, November 8, 2015

Initially, I decided to share it only to friends just in case there was something nefarious going on. Later on, I changed the status to public.

Here are some of the questions people asked me:

Did your admin accounts get compromised?
Are you spending enough to have a dedicated rep?
Any notifications from Facebook?
Are you accidentally unpublished?
Did you move it to the Business Manager?

The answer to all of these questions was "no." I searched all over to find out how to submit my issue to Facebook. I reached out to my network and someone eventually told me about the Report Pages that Disappeared form.

I also found where Facebook hides its support responses.

Listen to the show to discover what I determined I should have done at the beginning.

Reaching out to friends

I've been developing relationships with folks for ye...