The world was in a frenzy! People across the world were unable to access Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Whatsapp for approximately 14 hours. Although it may seem silly to watch the world have a meltdown over the inability to post a photo of what they had for lunch that day, the biggest effect was probably felt most by businesses and influencers!
Nowadays most businesses rely on sharing news, status updates, photos and so much more with their followers – aka their current customers and potential customers! This is something that is not going to change any time soon. Businesses need to be on social media to reach their fans and followers as well as potential new customers. Social media should be a part of every business’ digital marketing strategy. However, this outage also teaches business owners two important lessons
- Don’t limit your social media presence to just one or two platforms
- You NEED to focus on your subscriber list!
Limited Social Media Presence
It makes sense to focus on the social media platforms that provide the most bang for your buck when it comes to your digital marketing strategy. If Facebook, for example, brings you the most leads and business then you would be smart to focus on that platform and not to spend hundreds of dollars and hours on Twitter or Snapchat; especially if those do not perform well for you at all. However, the inability for your business to access Facebook on any given day should be a strong reminder that you should NEVER keep all your eggs in one basket!
If a platform like Facebook is your best performing social media platform – then focus on it and spend your most marketing dollars there. But do not neglect all other platforms. Your business should still be using Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram etc. You should be asking your fans and followers to follow you on all of these platforms and you would take an extra 5 minutes a day to share the same content on them as you do on your best performing platform.
When Facebook and Instagram were down, everyone flocked to Twitter. In fact, even Facebook and Instagram used Twitter to update the world on the status of their platform downtime! If they, as competitors, even have accounts and use them to reach the public – why aren’t you? If you have limited your business’ social media exposure – now is the time to set up business profiles on various other platforms!
Build Your Email Subscriber List
Did you have an important message you would have liked to announce to your fans and followers – but you couldn’t because Facebook and Instagram were down? Imagine if you had planned for a few weeks to surprise all of your followers with a surprise on that day; maybe you were planning a secret flash sale or you had a celebrity guest doing a meet and greet and you suddenly realize that you can’t reach any of your fans, followers or potential customers because social media is down! If you cant give live updates on fun and/or surprising events like these then you can’t reach the public to convince them WHY they should drop everything and run to your business/retail store, NOW! At moments like this, it is important to realize that if you had an email subscriber list – you would at least still have the ability to grab the attention of many, in their inbox. It may not be as impactful as social media (when you are promoting a same-day event, that is) however, you will at least still have an option to reaching customers vs the inability to let any of them know and losing all the extra business you could have generated that day.
Even better, imagine for one minute that Facebook (or any/all other social media platform you use for business) decides to close down or decides to simply remove your business account. It’s gone. All of your contacts – gone. All of the people you were engaging with – gone. All of your promotions and sales – no one will see them anymore, they are – gone! What are you going to do? How are you going to start from scratch and make sure that all of those people from before know where to find you online? It’s probably safe to say that over half of those fans and followers will not know that your account is gone and will not realize they are no longer following you. This means you have lost all access to reaching out to them if they only followed you on social media!
On the other hand, if you had all of those fans on your email subscriber list – the contacts would have been yours to keep and you could continue reaching out to them no matter what! An email list is very important and it belongs to you or your business. You don’t need to worry as much about social media shutting down if you still have the ability to reach out to fans in an email! If you have not started building your email list, it’s time to start! You should also begin encouraging prospective subscribers (on social media, in-store, and online visitors) to sign up by offering an incentive (free printable, % off next purchase etc).
Need more reasons for building your email list? Check this out.
Have you put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to social media or have you neglected to build your email subscriber list? Let us know your thoughts on both!