Instagram inadvertently drew a huge amount of attention to the World Breastfeeding Week campaign this week. The fast-growing social media photography platform banned the account of Melissa Jean Wilbraham, a childbirth and breastfeeding photographer from Queensland, Australia.

The deletion of the MelissaJeanBabies Instagram page, which has more than 24,000 followers on Instagram drew a huge amount of attention across social media. International news outlets including Huffington Post and Metro Online picked up the story. Hashtags of ‪#‎bringbackmelissajeanbabies ‪#‎bringbackmelissajean began trending on Facebook and Twitter.

I met this rockstar mama at @thebabysummit on the weekend💃 If you live in Melbourne and would love your birth captured then she’s the woman for you @australianbirth @laceybarrattphotography #worldbreastfeedingweek

A photo posted by Melissa Jean (@melissajeanbabies) on Aug 4, 2015 at 8:13pm PDT

Huffington Post reports Instagram’s statement clarifying their position on breastfeeding photography:

“We allow photos of breastfeeding on Instagram,” they clarified in a statement
We looked into what happened here, and this was a pure mistake that we’ve now rectified.
For context, our teams review content when it’s reported to us for violating our Community Guidelines.
They review millions of pieces of content daily – and as much as we’d like to be free of mistakes, we do make them. We are sorry that this happened, but we use cases like this to learn and improve.
We have reached out to @melissajeanbabies and apologised for our mistake.”

How Instagram’s Account Suspension Policy helped World Breastfeeding Week awareness campaign

For the marketing team for World Breastfeeding Week, you couldn’t have dreamed up a better PR story. For Melissa Jean Willbraham, the explosion of support across social media gave her a huge amount of publicity for her business. Capturing photographic images of new mothers and their babies is a true form of fine art and takes incredible talent.

In being forced to defend her work and it’s place on Instagram, Melisssa Jean Willbraham was able to explain the importance of breastfeeding why World Breastfeeding Week is such an important event in promoting breastfeeding and its health benefits to young babies.

With the huge number of Instagram users and media attention the fast growing Facebook-owned photography social media platform gets, the ‘scandal’ has generated a huge amount of attention for World Breastfeeding Week and in turn increased awareness and issues that the campaign intends to promote.

More about World Breastfeeding Week

World Breastfeeding Week is a global awareness week supported by UNICEF and the World Health Organisation. World breastfeeding week highlights the need for concerted global action to support women to combine breastfeeding and work. Whether a woman is working in the formal, non-formal or home setting, it is necessary that she is empowered in claiming her and her baby’s right to breastfeed. The World Breastfeeding Week campaign is run by the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA).   AwarenessDay.co.uk

How your Bristol Businesses can support World Breastfeeding Week

Small businesses in Bristol can support World Breastfeeding Week by adding a link to the campaign on websites and social media, using hashtags and tweeting about the campaign. Businesses with a target market of young mothers, pregnant women and parents of new-born children can actively support the campaign with posters and promoting the importance of breastfeeding.

For more information about how Bristol Marketing can help small business to get involved with awareness day campaigns, email campaign@bristol-marketing.com and we’ll work with you to help you achieve better marketing results whilst promoting important awareness campaigns.

To find an awareness campaign you want your business to support, visit our Awareness Day website here.