If you had access via Meta Business Manager ONLY and were never on it as your personal page, be warned you're going to have a VERY long time to get back in - if at all. It is possible though. My client was able to regain access after a month.
If you are on BOTH you can remedy this by yourself, see the links at the bottom of the page.
These things happen and can be very, very stressful for all involved. I was assisting a client earlier this year (2023) to help them regain access to their page and it was probably the hardest and most revealing experience I've ever had with Meta.
We first reported the issue as an "Other Page Issue" (as they have more than one) via the clients Business Manager and chatted with someone "real time" but that really only happened the first couple of times in a Messenger conversation. I have since tried to help one other person with trying to regain access to their Meta Business Account and page after it was hacked and they were removed completely as an Admin. We have discovered that they can't report the issue as above as they don't OWN (hadn't set up) and Admin another page. It seems you have to have both in order to approach them this way.
Please check the back end of your pages, you may be able to see them on your Business Suite Phone App and not on your laptop. I have seen this before (no idea how it happened??) and the client was able to continue posting and doing ads from there although it had some how lost access on his laptop.
You may have missed an authorisation notification and after a period of time it moves you back to partial access - thus you lose some "powers". This can easily be rectified if you already have another Admin and they can resend the request, which is another way I have fixed the Admin issue.
These Messenger conversations could then never be reopened and when trying to go back into them - at a later date to review their comments - they had been removed or archived. So my suggestion for you is to take copies of these conversations and save them as a word documents. I wish I had known previously and done that myself.
It's very important to educate yourself on how this all works. I was extremely lucky that during this work with this client, the marvellous Andrea Vahl wrote one of the best ever blogs on how Meta Business Manager works. It explains the different layers of how the Facebook Page, Business Suite, Ads Manager and the Business Manager comes together and what the capabilities of each one are as well. Please make sure to read it.
Normally when a personal page sets up a Facebook Business Page it (now in 2023) creates a Meta Business Suite that helps you schedule posts and check analytics. Inside Meta Business Suite you will find Ads Manager. It has it's own separate Ad Account ID. Here you can create ads by yourself or you can add people you trust, such as staff or friends as Ads Managers. However, if you want to outsource your ads to an agency like mine, they will add a further layer called Meta Business Manager to your account that helps aid interactions and permissions. The agency will include your business in their own Meta Business Manager. What the agency then does is normally ensure you're on as an Admin and you, in fact, then become like a company and you then work as an "employee" for the Meta Business Manager account, just like a Director does. The agency will normally have the same role as you or possibly a slightly lower role, this is perfectly normal and allowed.
You can actually create a separate Meta Business Manager for each Facebook page if you wish, and to some extent I would recommend this. As long as you are the Page Owner or Admin of each Facebook Page you wish to run ads with, you can have access to them all on one Meta Business Manager, which is what happened with this client. This client's Meta Business Manager owned the Facebook Page that he had lost access to. We had to regain access to it and get him back to being the business manager again.
It was remarkably tedious how long it took to finally ascertain what Meta were looking for, as they didn't send a full list of requirements for over 2 weeks! Then nearly a week later they asked for it to be put into a new format (all in one PDF), which we then sent to them numerous times.
They also asked for a Meta Business Manager ID so that they could add him back to it. The only reason we had a record of it at all, was because one of the agencies who created his Meta Business Manager had sent him an email with the number of it. There really is only one place you'll find the number and that is on the Meta Business Manager itself. If you no longer have access to it, you don't see it! It was a scary time until we found that email.
We also didn't pick up immediately that they had somehow set up two cases for the one issue in the support portal. (Only Facebook can set up the cases). They did have slightly different titles and case numbers but to be honest, we were only looking at the body of the text and not the titles. They both mentioned the same issue. We only noticed when we selected the link below and saw that there were two cases, so please check this and ensure that you're responding to the right one.
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/support/get-help - This is the Support Portal
or try here
https://business.facebook.com/business-support-home/
The Action Required section shows up when they send you a request for something:
Here you can see that two cases had been set up and below you can see one had been completed:
On this support portal, once you have selected the appropriate case (if you have more than one), you can also "Request an Update" or "Close the Case". This is where we posted every single day to keep the case open.
For those of you going through this, please do this first when you open a case with them:
They want all of the below sent in on ONE PDF, not separately. So please embed the ID, invoices, etc into the document.
At one stage Meta suggested we send them a video of what we see in the clients Meta business manager using Screencast-o-matic. This is a FREE way to record what you are doing on your laptop as you navigate through your business page and manager.
We tried the support chat facility after the first couple of days but we never found it working after that, not sure why, so don't be surprised if it doesn't work for you.
"For anything else, please feel free to contact us back through email or initiate a new chat for real-time support via https://www.Meta.com/business/help (https://www.meta.com/business/help)."
1. A copy of a valid government-issued photo ID, such as a current driver's license or a passport, of the individual signing the statement. You can find the different kinds of IDs they accept in the Help Centre: https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185?ref=cr.
2. A signed statement (watch this video to find out how to do an electronic signature, that they accepted) from a person with sufficient knowledge and authority (you the business owner, so staff can't do this for you) over this matter that includes all of the following:
a) A description of your relationship to the Page (including your authority to request a change in the person(s) who manage the Page, as applicable);
b) The name of the current person(s) who manage the Page, as applicable.
c) The relationship of the above person(s) to the Page;
d) An explanation of your request, and whether there has been a termination of the employment and/or business relationship with the named person(s), as applicable;
Example of a, b, c, d:
"A description of requestor relationship to the Business (and authority to request Admin access to my Business Page);
Requestor Name - Your Name, Your Email Address - Has admin rights on the Business Manager ID: Add the ID here
I, Your Name am the owner of the business and I have the authority to request Admin access to the Business Page;"
e) All documentation supporting your request (such as Articles/Certificates of Incorporation/Formation/Organization (we didn't use these), Business Licenses and Permits, DBA Documents, Tax Certificates and Licenses (nor any of these), Utility Bills, Bank Statements (we did use these though, another good reason to keep all of your invoices from Meta*. You'll find them in your emails under the title "Your Meta Ads Receipt", Summaries and Letters, Credit Score Reports, Securities and Trading Documents);
*Please note that the invoices must belong to the ad account(s) contained in the Business Manager the client wants to become admin of. In case they are not able to provide these invoices, they cannot add them as a Business Manager admin.
f) The Facebook account or email address associated with the Facebook account that you wish to have added as the new admin of the Page (make sure you tell them the email address in every message you send and remind them of the page URL as well; and
g) A declaration that the information you have provided is true and accurate (e.g. "I certify that the information provided is true and accurate") - your statement must include similar language. Use this wording, it works fine.
Take screenshots of all conversations, they may be more useful than you first realise, you're just too panicked to notice the detail.
After you report your case via the support page / portal through messenger, make sure to check the support page on a daily / weekly basis and double check to see that your emails from the Support Team are using just the ONE title heading.
Take a record of the Meta Business Managers you now have access too. If you have more than one then you can tell Meta the one's you have and the one that's missing is the one you need access to. Click this link to see them, it should open up to the ones you still have. See example below of how to find them:
Open Meta Business Suite and click on All Tools, scroll slightly down and click into Ads Manager.
Ad Account Overview - Record this ID number
Find your Business ID Information
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They only reason why I recommend daily contact is they have this text in their email:
Please be advised that this email ticket will be closed off by the system after 48 hours, should we not receive any response from your end. Feel free to get in touch with us if you need any further assistance and we will be very happy to assist you further.
We responded to any messages from the Support Team by email very swiftly and then posted the same message to the support portal every single day.
To this end, we never let it close off for the duration of the "experience". We emailed and posted to the portal https://www.facebook.com/business/help/support/get-help every day. Once you've posted to this you get an automatic response from Meta confirming they have received your message.
Please make it clear from day one what you want access to:
Now you just keep emailing them daily, through emails to the MANY people from the support team, who seem to have very poor communication skills and who are all doing what looks like cut-and-paste responses in their emails - for what seems like an eternity.
Over a four week and two day period we communicated through two different teams (because they set up two different "jobs" and had over 30 different people email / respond to us. It was very hard work!
Never before have I seen an advertiser so dedicated, yet still tenacious at the same time. You’re an inspiration to all of us!
Gotta say I was chuffed with that!
It really doesn't matter if you send a rather stern worded email or a polite one, you get the same response each time. I would personally advise against being rude as they get so much flak from people every day, it probably lessens their opinion of the people who reach out to them even more. Whatever you do, it's up to the powers that be to decide if and when you regain access. For many people it's never and I can imagine that would be a massive blow.
I have only ever helped one business do this, so this is not THE way to do this, it's just one way I did this with the one client. I hope you find this resource useful, over the weeks that we were working on this I found other links which you might find useful as well, I'll add to them over time and have listed them below. If I can be of any assistance, please let me know.
Other Useful Links for Facebook Access
How to Recover Facebook Page Access Updated 2022
Working with clients Nationwide from base in Mullingar.
