The influence of social media is an aspect of our society we love to bemoan and criticize but are essentially powerless to ignore or abandon. This is doubly true for small businesses – regardless of an owner or operator’s personal feelings about social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, operating well-regulated social media pages for one’s company is simply part of what it means to operate a business in the modern world. To choose not to participate in this space is tantamount to simply giving up on pursuing a massive collection of potential customers, and not a choice that any business would make lightly.
But what does a small business, such as a craft brewery, do when the fickle, opaque “community standards” of such a place turn against you for reasons that nobody seems to understand? To whom can one turn when your posts are being removed, or accounts are being locked down, and it’s impossible to reach any human form of customer service? For all too many breweries, the recent answer to these questions has simply been to hold tight, and hope that the situation literally fixes itself. A host of small breweries have been finding themselves at the mercy of Instagram in particular since autumn, struggling against a rash of (hopefully) random technical woes, which in many cases have seen their posts taken down, and in some cases have seen beer industry businesses locked out of their accounts entirely. Many theories have since been proffered, but none fully explains why so many breweries continue to be affected.
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