What if Facebook or Instagram Crashed Permanently?
This week, Facebook suffered it's worst outage in its history.
For more than 14 hours, Facebook & Instagram - along with other Facebook platforms like WhatsApp - were largely inaccessible around the world.
It definitely resulted in a spike of activity at Twitter, where the posts and apocalypse memes were running rampant (and at times hilarious!!).
But the outage does shine a light on the dangers of relying too heavily on Facebook & Instagram for your business.
It's like that old saying of the dangers putting all your eggs into one basket. Although when it comes to social platforms, you don't even own the basket.
Facebook & Instagram are definitely valuable tools to have in your marketing toolkit....but make sure they aren't your ONLY ones.
Because if these platforms were to disappear, or suffer a catastrophic data loss, there goes all of your followers.
You might have worked hard to have a few hundred, thousand or even more followers....but you have no way of connecting to them directly because you don't have their email address. Your followers belong to Facebook & Instagram, not you.
So what's the solution?
You need to make sure you are building your own assets that belong to you: a mailing list.
Your own database of names & emails, which you can use to directly reach out to your current & "might-be-but-not-yet" customers and clients.
And use Facebook and Instagram to help you build that mailing list so that their audience becomes your audience.
If you are one of those people who think they don't need a website because they can just be on Facebook, hopefully today has shown you the risks in that business strategy.
If you'd like to chat more about list building, and how to leverage Facebook & Instagram, I'd love to hear from you!
Send me an email at kerri@equestrianmarketingagency.com
Until next time!