I don’t have any good advice for you but I do sympathize. My wife runs a small coffee shop and about a month ago Instagram flagged her business username as spam without any warning which prevents anyone from tagging and sharing her business. She’s had the username for over a year, and does NOT spam other pages with it. The closest she ever gets is people taking pictures of their drinks in their stories and posting with the business tagged in them.
We’ve tried and tried to get in touch with someone at Instagram but it’s impossible to do so. The only reason we could figure out it was a spam issue is because I opened the Chrome developer tools at one point to review the network request made by the “Report a Problem” button and there was a property in the POST body labeled “spam=true” (the message on the screen was a generic “sorry we couldn’t do that please try again” error). Eventually we gave up and changed the username to get around it, but all of her branding material has the old username.
It’s incredibly depressing and frustrating that there are no avenues to get these kinds of things resolved, especially for small businesses that depend on word of mouth and social media to grow and succeed.
We’ve tried and tried to get in touch with someone at Instagram but it’s impossible to do so. The only reason we could figure out it was a spam issue is because I opened the Chrome developer tools at one point to review the network request made by the “Report a Problem” button and there was a property in the POST body labeled “spam=true” (the message on the screen was a generic “sorry we couldn’t do that please try again” error). Eventually we gave up and changed the username to get around it, but all of her branding material has the old username.
It’s incredibly depressing and frustrating that there are no avenues to get these kinds of things resolved, especially for small businesses that depend on word of mouth and social media to grow and succeed.