For one day in October, Facebook and Instagram went dark, and that left many businesses, including my own, scrambling for answers to the question: What now?
The social media giant’s recent outage, which affected all three of its platforms–Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the latest in a chain of damaging news about the company that started when a whistleblower identified herself on 60 Minutes alleging damaging claims about information that would have stopped the spread of Fake News.
Of the outage, Facebook says, “a maintenance error accidentally disconnected their servers from the rest of the internet.” While the two incidents appear to be unrelated, it’s important for business owners who rely on the platform to understand that investors are jumping ship.
However, Facebook isn’t the only company that could suffer from server problems. Most platforms provide scheduled maintenance to avoid outages, but platforms like Discord, Twitter, Pinterest, and others are also at risk.
Marketers rely on social media to work as it’s intended. One such business owner and marketer, Erik Coney, told NBCNews he uses it for “over 80% of his business”. The outage cost companies labor hours, stress, and confusion as their plans to present their brand that day were put on a startling halt.
So how can you protect your brand from this? In this article, you’ll learn the ins and outs of protecting your brand from social media outages.
Making an Outage-Safe Brand
Now that you know why it’s important to act to ensure your brand is safeguarded against this issue in the future. Here’s how:
- Monitor ad spend: When things go down, it’s important to understand how much an outage is costing you. If you have the labor to do so, someone should be actively managing the ad-spend that’s going to a specific platform. Knowing how much you an outage costs you can help you make decisions about when to start campaigns and when to pull them.
- Back-up your digital assets: If you have everything on Google Drive, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, make sure there are backups on a hard drive, flash drive or dedicated server. Backing up your assets is important no matter what they are.
- Get out and take new brand photos: If you could use some fresh air, get out and take more pictures. It may be hard to book a photographer like me, Kristina Maness, on the fly, but that doesn’t mean you can’t follow some of the basic principles of composition to give viewers a glimpse of what you did with your downtime once you have a chance
- Leverage email marketing: While we all get bombarded by emails sometimes, it’s still an important medium for businesses to work within. If all the social media platforms go down, you still have your email list.
- Make connections in your community: Community connections and business affiliations are important for your brand. If you have some time because 80% of your job is having technical difficulties, get out and network with people, provided you follow CDC public health guidelines.
- Diversify your social media presence: Don’t rely on one platform to reach your customers. If you don’t know by now, it’s time to diversify your social presence to touch your customers with authenticity wherever they hang out online.
For more information like this, find me on Instagram @kristinamaness, or at my website, where you can book a session.