Hello Nairalanders ,

I’d like to advice most social media users not to depend on their pages for picture storage or business . I learnt my lessons and I would love to share them with you.

On May 26 2018, after conceptualizing the thoughts of setting up a blog , I decided to start small as a micro blogger then probably grow with time .After an in-depth analysis of the social media apps, I opted for Instagram since it was a photo sharing app . I have a good understanding of the Nigerian Football community and the players so I created a niche to cater for Nigeria football news, media contents , rumors, gists etc and I tagged it FOOTBALLBLOG9JA .

It didn’t take long before I started gaining followers because my dedication , research , meetings ,interviews and contents were 100% . The first 7months was very demanding . Imaging having to travel to Asaba , Abuja , Owerri from Lagos at intervals to secure interviews and meetings without being paid a kobo. Gradually, I built a team that was on pay roll all from my pocket. We focused on reporting first hand undiluted news with credible source. We connected with bigger Instagram international news pages and boom !We were close to 50k organic followers with over 250,000 engagements and an average of 100,000 reach.

However, as we were building the fan base , our enemy base was growing too. The problem started when we got a mail from a fake “Instagram “ stating that our page was due for verification . In my head , It didn’t add up well to verify 50k followers but I played along . The mail redirected us to a website where we inputted our Instagram details and afterwards it requested for the password . It was at this point I had to reverse. Immediately, I instructed that we change our password, signed up for two-ways authentication and other password security tools. Exactly the third day, we got a log-in attempt alert from Enugu ! At this point , we realized how risky it was for us to put our I information on any site . Therefore , we agreed never to open any url that redirects us from the mail. As if Instagram was watching us , they sent an email claiming we had violated a community guide terms and we risk being deactivated with a URL redirecting us to a website which I didn’t bother clicking . After a while , they sent a message that they were pulling down our last post because the picture we posted had copyright which they did .


After some days , the next message we got was that our account has been disabled and we would no longer have access to the page . It was like an earthquake! Immediately, we started sending appeals. Till now , they’ve still not deemed it fit to activate it and it appears they are never going to reactivate it ! The painful part to this story is that , the deactivation came a day after we got our first major advert deal from a company in Spain ! See village people oooo.