All Meta company apps went down today (Oct. 4, 2021) including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. If your business is relying heavily on one or two apps, let's rethink how we strategize your digital presence.
If you’re freaking out then you need a better plan!
Even if you're not freaking out, we still need a great plan! I want to talk about how to avoid having your business being affected too much by social media. And to avoid going down when social media does!
As a small business, I would hope that you have taken advantage of social media to reach your target audience and grow your relationship with your customers and clients. However, I also hope you have taken measures to stay connected with that audience off of social media should something happen, like Meta going down, just as one example.
For small businesses that rely heavily on an online presence (and who doesn't these days?!), a platform going down or ceasing to exist can be damaging.
And let's face it, a digital presence is pretty much a necessity in today's business marketing world. Your audience expects it; A large percentage do their research on these apps before making purchase decisions.
Social media can be great to expand your audience by possibly hundreds of thousands, helping you reach a global audience and boosts business and sales.
But what happens if it goes down or your account is suspended for whatever reason? Your audience can vanish overnight. All that rapport gone. You lose contact. Putting you back at square one in building an online audience.
If you currently heavily use on one or two apps to build your business’s digital presence then you are relying on the success of another company (like Facebook) to keep yours afloat.
So what should you do? Here are my top tips to build a strong online presence:
Diversify your following!
Make sure your digital following is spread across various platforms owned by different companies.
Don't rely on one company to keep your digital presence afloat. I advise clients to use at least two platforms owned by different companies.
Twitter(now X), LinkedIn, Facebook, and TikTok, for example, are all owned by different companies.
Be sure to cross promote your content across various platforms and drive traffic between platforms and your website.
Have a website with great SEO
Build a website with great SEO and quality content! This can help you begin to gain organic traffic online.
YOU OWN your website!
Know what keywords your ideal is searching related to your offer and be sure to use these in the headings on your website as well as throughout the copy. Just be careful not to keyword stuff. this means using as many keywords as you can just to trick Google. Google is more sophisticated than ever and may actually penalize your website if it detects you are trying to manipulate it.
Create your own content in the form of blogs to help boost your SEO and generate more traffic to your own site.
Build an email list.
If one day your social account goes kaput, then what happens to all those followers and leads?
They're gone!
Start building an email list from day one, or start now, if you haven’t already! This allows you to stay in touch with interested prospects, your warmest leads. Don't rely on any third-party, like social media
.
All it takes is one email per week to stay top of mind with an interested audience.
Check out this blog on how to avoid losing everything to social media, because today this is more important than ever. You can also check the status of Facebook an other platforms at downdetector.com