Recover Your Facebook Account | What You’ll Need

In the last 6 months I’ve had an unusually high number of clients come to me after having their Facebook accounts shut down. I’m not exaggerating when I say there are tears, panic attacks, frustration, and seemingly hopeless pleas for help. Precious memories lost, business operations halted. Meta is never forthcoming as to why and most of these people are in the dark about the reasons. They hire me to try to get the account reinstated. Normally, this isn’t a common issue nor is it tremendously difficult to solve but below are several protective measures you can take to ease the process of how to recover your Facebook account or prevent it from happening all together.

User ID Step-by-Step

Every single time I’m asked to assist in the recovery of a suspended or terminated account, the one piece of information that makes or breaks the effort is the ability to produce your account ID number (also called User ID). It’s buried in your account settings and I want to walk you through the process to locate it.

If you want to watch the video, here you go. If you want the step-by-step for desktop, see below.

• Navigate to Facebook
• Go to your profile picture in the upper right hand corner
• Click on it to see Settings & Privacy
• Choose Settings
• Choose Security & Login
• Choose Apps & Websites
• Choose any active app you have connected
• If you’re like me and have no active apps, see the Removed Apps & Websites
• Choose View
• At the bottom is your User ID and you can copy it
• Save it for your records

Add Multiple Email Addresses

Please please please for the love of all things holy, make sure your contact information is up-to-date. You must be able to respond to emails they send you if anything goes wrong. It’s common for people to no longer have access to the first email they entered when they created their account but you can add new ones. Do this NOW before it’s a problem.

Go into your personal settings, visit Account Settings, make sure your email address is current and add an additional email where you can be contacted. I’ve truly lost count of the number of people that lose access to their account because they’ve never updated their contact info. Adding in your mobile phone number is just a good idea since it’s another route that can help you verify your identity while you work to recover your Facebook account.

Save Your Ad Account Number

Your ad account number is so much easier to find. Navigate to Meta Business Suite and see your Billing tab. Once you are in that section, if you are connected to more than one ad account, you’ll need to select the correct one, but it’s easy to copy and paste this number. Save it.

For good measure, I saved my Business Manager ID and my Page ID. You’ll have to a) have Business Manager turned on, b) be an approved user of Business Manager itself (just because you’re an admin of the page doesn’t mean you have this overarching access), c) find everything in the Settings gear at the bottom left hand corner of Business Suite, and d) all this info is available in the Business Assets portion. Just click on any asset to get more in depth identification information.

Facebook Page Access

If you can, add a second admin to your business page. Many brands lose access to their Facebook page because there’s no backup person. If you get locked out of your account, you’ll be locked out of your business page too. If the worst case scenario happens (and it does), the second admin can manage the page for you and/or reassign you access.

Make sure you remove people that should no longer have access! Make it a part of your exit process and remove their role to the page, group, or ad account (do this for every form of social media). A former employee or vendor shouldn’t be able to access the back-end when they no longer work with or for you, especially if it ended badly! You wouldn’t allow that person to keep keys to your office or the code to your safe would you? Check out this example of what can happen if you don’t protect your accounts from former employees.

Turn on Two Factor Authentication

I’ve already covered this one and its importance but I’m going to mention it again. This security setting prevents bad actors from accessing your assets. Learn how to turn on two factor authentication here. Use it everywhere on the web that you have important information.

I’m Here to Help

The stories I hear from my clients are always painful when it comes to this subject. I’d rather you never need me to help you recover your Facebook account but in case you do, here’s where to find me.