A friend messaged me at eleven o’clock one Tuesday night with three words… ‘My account’s gone.’
She’d been hacked, or possibly just locked out by the algorithm for a reason no one at Instagram could explain. Either way, two years of work, her enquiry pipeline, every DM from every person who’d booked her, all of it on the other side of someone else’s login screen. She wasn’t crying when she rang me. She was just very, very quiet. The kind of quiet that comes from realising you’ve been building something on land you don’t own.
And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since!
Presence and ownership are different things
Being on Instagram isn’t ownership, it’s a tenancy. The landlord can change the locks, change the rules, or sell the whole building, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The same is true of Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn. They’re all really useful, but none of them are yours.
There are only two things in your online marketing that you genuinely own. Your website. And your email list. That’s it.
Your website lives on a domain you’ve paid for. The contents belong to you. You can run it for the next twenty years without asking anyone’s permission. Your email list is the same, those addresses are yours, exportable, moveable, reachable any time. Nobody can take either of these away because an algorithm decided something.
This isn’t anti-Instagram
I want to be clear: I’m still on Instagram. I’ll be there next week. It’s a brilliant shop window. But shop windows belong in buildings someone else owns, and you would never build the foundations of your business on one.
The way I think about it — social media is where people meet you. Your website is where they get to know you properly. Your email list is where the relationship lives. Each one feeds the next.
The honest question to ask yourself
If your Instagram disappeared tomorrow morning, how much of your business would still be there? Could you still send emails to your existing customers? Could a new enquirer find you on Google? Could you still take bookings?
If the honest answer is ‘actually, no, Instagram is pretty much how my business works’ this is the moment to start shifting. Not in a panic. Not all at once. Just gently, deliberately, over the next few months.
A small thing to try this week
Take ten minutes today. Turn on two-factor authentication on your Instagram (the authenticator app version, not text-message). Get the free verified badge, most people don’t realise the free version exists. Screenshot your recovery codes put them somewhere proper, not your phone’s Notes app.
That doesn’t fix the ownership problem, you’re still renting from Instagram. But it locks the front door while we work on the foundations.
My friend hasn’t got her account back, by the way. She has however, finally start building a proper website. She told me last week she wishes she’d done it five years ago.
Gini x
If you want help with this
I build, host and look after websites for small service-based businesses, yours to own and yours to update. If your website is the thing you’ve been quietly avoiding, drop me a message. No pressure, no sales call, just a conversation.