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.
We understand everything that comes with running a business - accounting, sales, marketing, and all the other incredibly important components all while trying to manage your social platforms, is hard work and time consuming. After a hectic day at Facebook you know you need to expand your reach to other platforms so your business doesn't potentially slip into the dark after a massive blackout. Let us help with planning your business' approach to all of the different social media platforms. Here at PAKC Solutions we help translate your message, your brand, into the best content forms for each platform and explain how doing so increases brand recognition and ultimately helping more clients or customers. We take the time to get to know what your brand is about, what kind of story you want to portray, and how that correlates to your products and services then we bring that to life throughout all the top available platforms with video/photography/copy write/graphic design and more. Schedule a coffee with us and we can chat about what we can do to help your business expand it's reach.
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