I’ve spoken many times before about the risk we often run as business owners when using social media. Time and time again I see people putting all their eggs in one basket and using social media as their only source of marketing, and worse…sales!
When social media goes down how does that affect your business? Did you sigh a breath of relief when it came back on, so you could start your marketing and sales again? What would happen if it disappeared completely?
So, what happened and is it likely to happen again?
Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s VP of infrastructure said,
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,”
Phew, that’s bit techy, so in a nutshell Facebook’s systems stopped talking to the wider internet and it is always possible that these things could happen again. There is also talk that there are some internal struggles happening at Facebook to do with how they handle hate speech and using the algorithm to promote bullying and reactions of people to negative posts. This is all speculation and Facebook as a leader of social media innovation need to lead by example of how social media changes for the better in the future and who knows when it may disappear again….and for how long?
How can we ensure we have a robust marketing strategy so that if social media goes offline or disappears, we can still run our business? I’m not saying you need to think about which other social media channels you should sign up to and start making content for as the same thing could happen to them all.
What I do want you to think about is what other forms of marketing could support your business, as well as social media? Let’s face it, social media is a wonderful marketing tool, but perhaps it’s time to start thinking about what else we can do.
My top tips on how you can market your business without putting all your eggs into the social media basket are:
1 – Email marketing
I have said this time and time again, that with social media, you do not own your audience. They can unfollow you at any time. Sometimes you may spend years building up a following only to then have your page hacked or blocked and to start again. Or, like we saw this week your chosen social media channel may disappear altogether.
With email marketing, everyone who signs up to your email list are a captive, warm audience. You also own that data, so it’s not going anywhere. If you became unstuck and social media disappeared, then email marketing should be your ‘go-to’ back up plan. You have a captive audience and you can still communicate with them and sell to them. So, maybe it’s time you started thinking about how you can do this.
Check out my recent course on how to use email marketing to get you started.
2 – Website
Quite often people don’t have a website because they have a Facebook page. However, how many times do you search for things on Google? Yes, your Facebook page may show up, but again what if Facebook, or other social media platforms disappeared? Particularly if you have a product-based business, how can you continue to sell your products if you don’t have a platform to do this? You have more control of your own website and how this works and of course – your audience data. It may also be time to think of other platforms you can use such as eBay, Etsy or Amazon (if you don’t want your own website) as ways of ensuring your products continue to be sold.
3 – Traditional Marketing
There is a lot to be said for good old-fashioned marketing as well. There is nothing quite a like a piece of editorial in a paper or a magazine, networking face-to-face and making connections, sales promotions or flyers drops. This can often be seen as harder work, but there are some benefits to still be found in more traditional marketing techniques that shouldn’t be discounted.
Remember word of mouth is always the most powerful marketing tool in your tool box, so get out there and be seen.
Yes, I have a Facebook group, which you can join here and I’m on Instagram, Twitter etc, but if you want to take this opportunity to be part of my email list you can sign up here and remember if you want to know about other forms of marketing visit my courses page here.
