Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp have been down for a few hours. This is not a small failure, but the duration of this event suggests something larger. In addition to the anxiety of some users who cannot post kittens on social networks or yell at the enemy on duty, there are more delicate situations at stake related to security or marketing, for example.
While security is a key issue and hoping that there was no breach of sensitive data linked to accounts, I want to focus on marketing because this is my job and the economic damage to companies can be significant. Think, for example, of those who have invested their communication budget for a strategy carried out solely on Facebook or Instagram. Tomorrow these companies will have to reckon with how much traffic or how many leads they lost from such a prolonged down. But we can learn an important lesson from this story: always diversify.
Lesson number 1: diversify communication and marketing channels
The Web offers a plethora of solutions for communicating. For example, among social media alone, in addition to Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Mark Zuckerberg), we can choose Twitter, LinkedIn or many others. We can upload a video to Facebook, YouTube or even Vimeo. Or we can use instant messaging tools such as Telegram. Advertising is not only social, but also travels on Google’s search network or with display ads on sites that are part of Google’s network or even on other distribution channels.
Diversifying allows us to take countermeasures in down situations like this, or to respond to changes in these platforms’ algorithms or unilateral decisions. Are we no longer okay with Facebook’s new rules? Well, we can easily move our communication to Twitter. Google has changed its algorithm once again and your site is penalized? Okay, so let’s leverage social media to recover traffic and visibility.
But be careful: when we diversify, we always make sure that the brand identity is consistent with the chosen channel. Choosing an unsuitable channel often creates grotesque and deleterious effects. Imagine a brand with a serious, institutional tone of voice and a target audience of older users launching on TikTok: the risk of making a bad impression is real.
Lesson #2: Target the site, the presence you can control directly
Our page on Facebook and Instagram, our profile on Twitter are not really ours. In fact, we have registered an account on a platform owned by someone else who can change the rules suddenly and without asking our permission. Therefore, it is good to have these online presences as well, but not only.
The only online presence we own is the website. To tell the truth, even a site relies on servers that we rent from third-party companies. In any case, we have full control over the content of the site and dictate our own rules (within the law, of course). A showcase site or e-commerce is therefore the must-have starting point for any digital marketing strategy. Let’s start here and diversify.
