We’re showing our age, but hear us out:
Do you remember when text messaging first hit the mainstream? If so, you probably remember the unnerving sensation of a “phantom text”—when you KNOW your phone just buzzed or dinged, signaling a text message. But when you looked at the message display on your hot pink Razr, there were “no unread messages.”
Many of us felt a similar situation on October 4, 2021 as we reflexively clicked the Instagram app only to find the gray circle of doom endlessly spinning above friends’ stories that we couldn’t see. So, we closed the app, and 5 seconds later, found ourselves instinctively opening it again. If you’re anything like me, you repeated this cycle until the app finally came back online Monday night.
I think we all learned some things from this experience:
On a personal/societal note: we seriously need to analyze the role these social media networks play in our lives.
On a professional note: we seriously need to diversify our marketing channels so we can communicate with our target audiences.
Since we’re a marketing agency and not a life coach, we’ll stick with what we know best.
Keep reading to dive into the key takeaways your business should learn from the Facebook shutdown.
For every minute Facebook was offline, it’s estimated that the company lost around $220,000, and that’s just one of the many revenue streams that were impacted by the outage. But it’s important to note that Facebook isn’t the only one losing money to outages. When a similar outage occurred in 2019, the Verge reported on one small business owner who lost around $10,000 from a scheduled advertising and influencer campaign that never saw the blue light of a cell phone screen. We’ll no-doubt see similar stories in the coming days/weeks about the impact of this most recent outage.
Just as this wasn’t the first Facebook outage, we have to assume it won’t be the last—especially with pending regulatory changes that are already happening in other countries, and are well on their way to becoming law in the US. While we don’t know what those changes will look like in practice, we can assume that they will have a large impact on the way businesses use social media for customer engagement and advertising. You may be wondering how you can prepare a forward-thinking marketing strategy that keeps your business, products, and services on the digital map. We’ve got a few thoughts on that.
Interested in learning how to build a marketing strategy that survives the next social media shutdown?
Read part two of this series, where we’ll discuss applicable strategies for customer acquisition, engagement, and your social strategy 2.0 — coming soon!
