The downside of social media for architects: why you shouldn’t build your marketing assets on shifting sands
I recently received an early morning phone call from a marketing and comms manager in a mid-sized practice, whose identity I have obscured for the purposes of this story.
Her voicemail message said:
“Hi Rachael, it’s Jane here from EFG Architects. I just wanted your advice on something and I thought you might be an excellent person to help. Thanks, bye.”
Be wary of putting all of your marketing eggs into one social media basket.
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
Jane isn’t someone I’ve spoken to previously, but my attention was piqued by her request and I was happy to try and help, so I called her back.
She explained that EFG had been locked out of its Instagram account, which had more than 5000 followers; and that Instagram was one of the key marketing channels that the practice relied upon to connect and engage with current and future clients.
Jane had attempted to provide the correct information to unlock the account, to no avail, and she was worried that the practice would lose its valuable social media asset, and be forced to build a new following.
I’ve heard of this happening before – the Australian Design Alliance was locked out of its Instagram account in 2018, without any warning or recourse, and had to build its profile again from scratch.
The ADA was locked out of its Instagram account in 2018, and had to rebuild its Followers from zero. Luckily, they had an email subscriber list in place to kick-start the process.
Fortunately, the ADA had an email subscriber list and was able to rebuild its follower count by emailing subscribers and explaining to them what had happened, and asking them to follow the new account.
So the first thing I asked Jane was whether EFG Architects had an email subscriber list in place. She said no; email hadn’t been a priority at the practice.
What are the benefits of using Email versus Social Media?
I recommended that whether she was managed to reinstate the Instagram account or not, it would be useful to create a subscriber list going forward – especially to capture the details of prospective and future clients – because the social media landscape is shaky ground, in terms of owning the connection to your audience.
You are at the mercy of these account-freezing bots, algorithm changes, Instagram’s shifting priorities around static posts and video, and range of other factors that are well outside of your control.
For example, this article explains why Instagram engagement is down for Feed posts across all accounts at the moment. In short, Instagram is prioritising video content in the form of Reels over static feed posts, to compete with Tik Tok, whose user stats have overtaken Instagram’s.
In contrast, if your business has an email subscriber list, you own the connection to your followers and people interested in your services – that can include past, present and future clients, collaborators and consultants, stakeholders and others who are keen to find out more about your practice and projects.
To be on the safe side, you should definitely take a backup/download of your subscriber list every month or so, if you use an email service providers such as MailChimp or MailerLite.
Another advantage of email is that it’s usually used as “push” marketing, whereas social media is more frequently a “pull” channel (at least in the way architects use it). That means that email provides more control over when you deliver your messaging, and how many of your subscribers are likely to see and engage with it.
(I know that many architects don’t like receiving emails themselves, so they assume that people won’t want to hear from them. But remember - subscribers can easily opt in and out of email lists, so they have the option to join or leave your list if your content isn’t useful or doesn’t meet their needs.)
Social media is a great marketing tool, if you use it in concert with other channels such as Emails and your Website.
Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash.
How to restore access to your Instagram account
Back to my call with Jane, we discussed the steps she’d already taken to try and resolve this issue.
The Instagram bots wanted photographic evidence to confirm the age of the account holder, but she hadn’t yet asked the directors to provide that information. So I suggested that she could try and obtain and upload the practice owners’ photographic identification.
Incidentally, the following day, another contact told me that her Facebook account had also been locked, and that her attempts to unlock it by providing copies of her driver’s licence and passport had failed.
It turned out that her account was the subject of a fraud case in another state, and she was forced to set up a new profile to regain access to Facebook, meaning that she had to reconnect with her contacts and start from scratch to rebuild her links to various communities.
That didn’t sound too promising for Jane and EFG, but I followed up with her after a few days, by which time I could see the EFG Architects account was visible on Instagram once more.
She wrote back to me:
“I was just about to send you an update and thank-you. In final desperation I uploaded [our director’s] drivers licence and it worked! Immediately!”
Jane also gave me permission to share her (awful!) experience with you, my readers, to benefit others who might find themselves in the same predicament.
She explained that the account had been locked because:
“Insta is cracking down on birthdays (none or wrong). We didn’t have it listed on our admin form – so we got targeted for being under 13!”
In trying to resolve the issue, Jane had researched plenty of how-to articles on Reddit and other blogs, learning in the process that to beat the appeal bot you have to:
Fill out the appeal form on mobile – desktop doesn’t work
Spell the Account name EXACTLY as it is on the form of ID
Photo ID seems to be what they are after (even though they say they’ll accept bank statements, etc)
Jane has started a subscriber list for the practice website, after losing access to Instagram temporarily.
Phone by Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash
Jane explained that while the director isn’t associated with the practice’s Instagram Business account, the use of his name (which appears in the practice name) seemed to work.
She also wrote:
“And I’ve taken your advice and added a mailing list sign up form to our website!!”
I was glad that this case worked out in EFG Architects’ favour, because it could easily have gone the other way – as it did for the Authentic Design Alliance.
And even thought it was resolved satisfactorily, the process of responding to the problem took Jane’s time and energy away from other more important tasks, and was incredibly stressful for her and her colleagues.
Jane said:
“I found it very isolating and frustrating not to have any humans to speak with at META about the issue. We were [caught unaware] by this. Although we only have 5k followers, a lot of the chat posts I read were from small businesses that had built enormous organic follower numbers. I think the smaller the business or practice, the more exposed you are, as you could be heavily relying on Instagram and Facebook for your sales.
“So, the more we can share the information – and warning – the better!”
Thanks Jane for getting in touch in the first place, and for allowing me to share this story with others. Hopefully, these insights will help other architecture practices overcome a similar problem quickly.
Let me know in the comments if you’ve ever been locked out of a social media account, or had to rebuild your following from scratch. Or if you’d rather not share publicly, send me an email.
Are you keen to work with me directly?
I provide three services to architects, ranging from two-hour Acupuncture Sessions to the three- month Review + Reset consulting package.
If you’d like a short, sharp injection of business development or marketing expertise – to talk about any business development or marketing issues you’re grappling with, including social media – you can book an Acupuncture Session here. You can choose the topics we discuss, and tap into my knowledge, experience and connections to access insights that are customised for your practice.
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