Your Pinterest account has been suspended - What to do?

Last week I opened presales for my first book, Framed: A Villain’s Perspective on Social Media. Self-publishing is an arduous journey. As more people write and release books, better resources and tools have emerged. Unfortunately, this means that to stand out, the author has to do everything. For the first-timer, there’s no skipping steps and no success purely based on the merits of the book

I’ve started running ads. My budget is low since selling presales is much harder than selling “available” copies but I have money earmarked to try test out different strategies on all the major platforms. It’s best to learn lessons early in the process.

Yesterday I decided to try out Pinterest. I created a Pinterest account and set up my business. Here’s the advertisement image that I submitted to my promotional “board.”

If the dimensions and style did not make it obvious, this was an image I was testing on Snapchat Ads. It’s far from perfect, but it’s provocative and people click on it. I didn’t know that much about Pinterest but the audience targeting was good and I figured this ad would translate pretty well. I confirmed my payment details and submitted the ad for approval.

Rather than the ad not being approved, my account was suspended entirely. “Hi there, We suspended your account because we noticed some activity that appears to violate our policies against spam."

Pinterest’s contextless ban raises the eyebrows. A human reviewer could probably discern that Framed is a book about spam. It contains commentary about spam, preventing spam, and how software engineers facilitated spam. However, it is not a spam guidebook. I didn’t realize this would ever be an issue, and the automated email provided no context as to whether the problem was the imagined content of the book, the ad copy, or something related to my business entity.

I looked forward to appealing, making changes to my ad copy if required, and proceeding to test Pinterest’s ad platform. I believed that my account was banned in error so I clicked “this link” to let them know.

My “appeal” amounted to clicking a link. No chance to write an explanation, no context on what happened, no contact with a human. Just a click. “Thanks for your appeal! We will take a look soon.“

One topic I address in Framed is that balancing act of catching wrongdoers while not making the user experience dreadful. The stakes are higher when the “user” is a paying customer to an advertising platform. No context bans are harmful. If you are going to hand them out to paid advertisers, you’d better be damn sure.

Upon further investigation, I learned that there was an appeal process through the Help Center. I followed that process and submitted a real appeal. One minute later, my account was reactivated.

Whether they reviewed my click-appeal or my written appeal, the resolution came awfully fast. Now let’s see if I can run my ad or if mentioning spam-adjacent activities will continue to get treated as if it’s spam.