Honestly, this is one of those situations where you realise how little control we actually have over our own platforms. We went through the exact same circus with our TikTok account-months of appeals bouncing off bots that clearly haven't been updated since 2021. Absolute nightmare.
What finally got traction? Leveraging our ad account manager. If you're running any paid campaigns, that's your real foot in the door. We made sure to mention every business contact we'd ever dealt with, and within two weeks it landed in front of an actual human. Still took a while after that, but at least we had a pulse.
The biggest lesson though - don't wait around for the original to come back. TikTok will leave you dangling for months with zero explanation. Get a backup account live now. Start rebuilding your audience there, keep posting, keep your community engaged. And keep filing those appeals on the side. It's exhausting, but the team behind the scenes will thank you for not letting everything grind to a halt.
