Facebook Down – The Future of Your Business

Facebook Down

As most of you know by now, on March 13th, 2019, Facebook suffered a massive outage that lasted nearly 20 hours and affected many countries and regions.  It was one of the worst technology blackouts in modern days.  While the social media giant assured the world it wasn’t due to a DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service is where hackers try to shut down a site by flooding it with traffic), the behemoth still couldn’t pinpoint the exact issues that caused the world-wide malfunction.  And while the outage is over, as of this writing, they are still thoroughly investigating the matter to make sure it wasn’t due to nefarious activity.

The issue stemmed to most of the Facebook family of applications – Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus – but everything went back to normal as of 9 pm Central time.  Even though the issues are resolved, social media users are enraged that such a massive occurrence could happen in this age of technology and 24/7 instant gratification and access.

The Future of Your Business

While many valid points were raised on both sides of the fence, the outage caused many in the business world to ponder their own marketing strategies in the event another occurrence, or perhaps a complete shutdown of all social media, should happen.  So, how does this affect your business and advertising?

Breathe easy.  The likelihood of a complete shut down of the internet is extremely rare.  In the off chance it could ever happen, your business will not fail.  There are still the traditional avenues of marketing – print, TV, radio, trade shows, conventions, tie-ins, in-store demos, visual displays, standard billboards, mobile billboards – that you can fully utilize and stay profitable.  If you have a business solely built on selling across the internet only, you can still transition to traditional marketing and tweak your processes to make it work.  All it will take is a little elbow grease and ingenuity.

However, since that scenario will most likely never occur, it’s time to look at your online marketing plans.

Better Marketing For The Future

Social Media Marketing is an arena all its own with layers upon layers of tactics and blood, sweat and tears building of relationships and trust.  After the Facebook outage yesterday, this only solidifies the importance of building relationships with your current client base and establishing a positive brand identity to gain the trust of the world at large.

Your social media isn’t just about getting likes or snagging shares for the importance of back link juice, it’s about the PEOPLE on the other end.  By creating content that answers their questions, provides thought-provoking conversation or supplies them with helpful tips or tools necessary to make better decisions or cost-saving purchases, you are influencing their lives.  However, you have to be genuine in this endeavor.  Consumers can see through half-hearted attempts or will become immune to your back-handed selling and your brand trust will tank.

Become a helpful company.  Someone who wants to give away knowledge and better your consumers daily life.  This speaks volumes to consumers.  They will feel appreciated and, in return, will give you their loyalty and trust.  Both of which are VITAL in increasing sales and expanding services.

This includes following you through other channels or engaging more heavily with your site in the event that another “catastrophe” happens.

Strengthen Other Channels

While increasing your engagement and connectivity with your social media followers is important, you should also focus on solidifying the other marketing avenues in your overall strategy.  Social Media Marketing is still a key factor in your digital advertising strategy but you should also consider:

• Make sure your website is optimized and that you pull special focus for earning high-quality backlinks.
• Try to accumulate an email list for all of your consumers by creating opt-in opportunities.  Email marketing can be a huge source of communicating news, deals or content and can help maintain those relationships.
• Make sure your website blog is constantly updated with fresh, insightful material.  Your content should always provide value first and any call-to-actions second.  Never look at what you can get in return.  By providing great content consistently, you can be looked at as a thought-leader for your industry.
• If Pay-Per-Click Campaigns are part of your strategy, make sure you do extensive research to ensure that you are reaching the right target audience and maximizing the copy to attract them.  PPC can be a game of constant fine-tuning to find the correct combination that works for you so be patient and don’t be afraid to change it up.
• Press Releases can be a boon to getting on major news and blogging sites.  Those sites can give your company and your content a legitimacy that is hard to come by.  Be sure what you send out is relevant, engaging and reflects your business in a positive light.
• Consider adding more options to your content.  While video, infographics and good old fashioned articles reign supreme, consider ebooks, white papers, surveys, etc.  Long-form content can actually be used as a pretty sweet incentive to attract email opt-ins for your email marketing list.
• Sales funnels are the crux of conversions for your products and services.  This is an important factor to consider for your site and overall marketing.  Funnels can be extremely complex with a variety of channels or simple two-click call-to-actions.  This greatly depends on your company, product/services, what you are looking to accomplish and how well you structure your sales funnel.  This is a crucial step that should be well-thought, tested and an area that you are constantly changing and upgrading.

The Great Facebook Outage of 2019 might not have caused the world to physically collapse but it did offer us an opportunity to see our marketing outside the scope of likes and posts.  In order to adapt to any changes in the marketing landscape, your overall strategy should leave room for flexibility and the ability to adapt.  If you spend some time focusing on how to strengthen your relationships and tweak your other marketing channels aside from social media, you will have created an unbeatable advertising foundation that can sustain your company even in the most desperate of times.

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