Amid FB and IG outages - Is your business prepared to handle a Social Media outage?

Yesterday, OCT. 4th Facebook announced all of its internal servers and its platform

extensions (IG, Whatsapp, Oculus, FB Messenger, and IG TV) went dark yesterday for upwards of six hours. The social media giant says their services were disrupted due to

internal "configuration changes." For most users it was a disruption to their memes, news, connection to friends/family members and daily dose of "serotonin". However businesses all over the platforms felt an impact. MarketWatch reports that FB lost out on nearly $60 million in revenue due to the outage which is sure to mean that businesses that utilize these social websites took an toll as well. Imagine the impact it had to the businesses who solely or mostly use the platform to assist in running their business. When you own a small business its super important to have a website in pair with social media to assist in promoting products or services, but its a pretty substantial impact when you can't conduct business on one of the worlds largest platforms. It begs the question - "What should you do to prepare for the next social outage?"

We've all probably heard the expression "Don't keep all of your eggs in one basket." from our parents or grandparents but this is a perfect example of why you shouldn't rely on just one platform of social media. Not having the ability to post/message/interact with your customers, clients, or followers is frustrating and not great for business but not being able to make sales of your products or services can be detrimental to today's business, and whether you believe it or not, possibly tomorrow's - let us explain.

Let's say you've built quite the following on FB and IG then it disappears off of the planet tomorrow do your customers/clients/followers know that they can reach you or see your content or products elsewhere? Do your customers know how to contact you offline? When the outage occurred millions of users turned to new Twitter and TikTok accounts for their memes or news. If you don't have another means of connection to your followers you could lose all the hard work you put into building up your platform.

Now this isn't a blog post about how you should never use FB or IG again, as a creative media company we strongly urge you to rethink your social media strategy. You never want to get caught out in the rain without an umbrella or all of your eggs in one basket like we mentioned before. FB/IG are incredible resources for growing and maintaining connection to your business, but its not the only place for business. We strongly recommend that you do not use social media as your primary source of contact with your customers. If Facebook messenger was the only way any of your contacts could reach you yesterday, then you might have run into quite the scare. YouTube and LinkedIn are other great places to grow increased awareness to your products and services. The beautiful thing about FB, IGTV, and YT is they have the ability for longer form content (10+ minute videos). LinkedIn can support up to 10 min videos, however you can post the same videos to all of those platforms and entice a completely different audience. Twitter is more of a social talk platform but users can post pictures and videos close to 3 minutes similar to how TikTok can handle videos in a smaller form up to 3 minutes. They're great places to make shorter form videos or clipping your longer videos down to direct traffic and increase engagement on YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn. That's not even mentioning the benefits of having a podcast or a website blog like this one.

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