WHAT THE TECH?
with Your Mate Matt
Imagine waking up tomorrow, opening Instagram, and your business page is gone.
No warning. No reason. Just a “this account has been suspended” notice and a contact form nobody ever answers.
It happens. Every week. To businesses that have done nothing wrong.
Someone who’s spent three years building a following of 4,000 local customers — gone in an afternoon. Their whole way of telling regulars about weekend specials, new stock, opening hours over the long weekend — evaporated.
Here’s the thing most business owners haven’t clocked: your social media pages don’t belong to you. They belong to Meta, or TikTok, or whoever owns the platform. You’re renting the space. And like any rental, the landlord can change the rules, raise the rent, or evict you whenever they feel like it.
That’s exactly what’s been happening.
Facebook’s organic reach — the percentage of your followers who actually see your posts without you paying — has dropped to under 2%. If you’ve got 1,000 followers, around 20 of them will see each post. The rest? You need to pay to reach them. That’s not a glitch. That’s the business model.
Meanwhile, accounts get locked for using the wrong hashtag. Pages get suspended because an algorithm flagged them by mistake. Whole businesses disappear overnight because of a password reset email nobody saw.
None of this means ditch social media. It’s still useful. But it shouldn’t be the foundation of your business.
What you actually own:
Your website. It’s your digital shop. Nobody can shut it down, change the rules, or charge you more to show it to your own customers. You control what’s on it, what it looks like, and where it sends people.
Your email list. If someone gives you their email address, you can reach them directly. Forever. No algorithm in the way, no platform deciding who sees what.
Your Google Business Profile. Technically still Google’s platform, but it’s the closest thing to owning your spot on the map. When someone searches “cafe in Lakes Entrance,” they’re not scrolling Instagram. They’re looking at Google.
The move isn’t to delete your Instagram. It’s to stop treating it like the foundation. Use social media to point people back to things you own — your website, your email sign-up, your review link.
Social media is the billboard on the highway. It’s not the shop.
If a tweak to Instagram’s rules or another drop in reach tomorrow would put your business in trouble, that’s not a marketing strategy. That’s a rental agreement with no lease.
