On March 14th 2019, Facebook and Instagram went down around the world for millions of users for 10+ hours.
It was dubbed The Great Facebook and Instagram Outage of 2019. And really, some great memes came out of it!
In all seriousness though, outages of social media platforms (especially one as long as this one) serve as a good reminder to “not put all your eggs in one basket”. Many businesses – especially the ones who solely relied on Facebook and Instagram marketing – became stuck for those 10+ hours. They were at the mercy of the tech giants.
But what if Facebook, Ads Manager or Instagram were to go down and never resurface? Scary proposition! (And yes – as a Social Media Manager it unsettles me, too. Which is why I am also branching out into Digital Marketing Consulting).
So here’s some tips for you to keep plugging away at in your businesses, so that if/when Facebook and Instagram meltdown again, you’ve done some prep that will help keep your digital marketing strategy afloat.
-Make sure you’re always working towards getting your social media followers onto your email list. You “own” your email list, but you don’t own your Facebook etc. pages.
-Don’t rely on just one or two platforms to market your business. Work on building your presence on others as well. This could be LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Tik Tok.
-Make sure your website is robust and you’re keeping it updated with content (like blogs) & make sure that your email list opt-in forms are visible and easily accessible.
-Be on the look out for new and different digital marketing strategies that could serve your business now (or in the future if other methods become obsolete). These strategies could be SEO, content marketing (specially in relation to your website/blog), email marketing, influencers, video/YouTube, podcasting, events, other social media channels, other paid advertising avenues like Google Ads, Youtube, and WeChat.