A wake-up call from the Instagram and Facebook Blackout
Unless you were living under a rock yesterday, you know that Facebook and Instagram were down for about eight hours, which is equivalent to a lifetime on social media.
Panic set in quickly as Instagram and Facebook users, a combined 247.1 million people in the United States alone, flooded the working social sites (Twitter and LinkedIn) to essentially freak out.
This is a good reminder that social platforms aren't the beginning and end to digital marketing. It can be easy to get caught up in the social game and hang your hat on how many followers you have or how you’ve been able to grow engagement rates, but this was a good reminder that no content posted to social media is truly owned by you!
If Facebook or Instagram shuts down tomorrow, all the work, time and money you’ve invested in curating content and growing your followers on the platforms shut down with them.
So, what does this mean for brands? Don’t pigeonhole all your PR and digital marketing on the world of social media.
To be clear, social media is an important and extremely influential channel, but if that’s where all your content, time and budget is going, you were completely out of luck yesterday as none of your potential customers had the opportunity to hear from you.
To combat this, and make sure you’re still relevant if social crashes again (hint, it will), you have to be sure you’re still devoting time to mastering the basics of digital.
Are you uploading the social content you’re curating to your website? Are you using forms and content to capture emails on your site to grow your email marketing list?
Utilizing traditional blogs and email marketing may seem like "old school" content marketing, but as two of the most popular social sites were down, BizCom was still able to digitally share important messages for clients through their blogs and through the influencers we partner with, as they were still getting lots of valuable clicks to their traditional websites featuring content from our clients!
Both platforms were back up and running by early evening, but if you’re brand is only focusing on your social presence, you lost a valuable eight hours of interaction with customers.
It wasn’t pretty, but we’re using this social blackout as a wake-up call to remember that even in a social world, the digital marketing basics are just as important as ever.