After yesterday's massive Facebook outage (as well as Instagram and Whatsapp), everyone is asking the same question...If the 14h outage in Facebook database caused SO MUCH HASSLE (and measurable losses):
- Some people couldn’t log into Facebook at all
- Some people couldn’t reset their passwords
- Most people didn’t see their IG feed update
- Most people couldn’t post photos, update their statuses, or share photos in messages
- A lot of people experienced issues logging into external tools if they registered using Facebook 😱
What would happen if social media disappeared one day?! 😱
Of course, this is the darkest, but not completely impossible scenario. For most marketers and business owners it would be a proper apocalypse.
But does it have to be?
No. As a business owner - you need to be prepared for such things. Just like we use insurance to protect our house from flooding, for example, we should "insure" our businesses against losses related to the lack of access to social media. And for us, social media are a primary tool for communication with clients and potential clients.
So how to protect yourself and your business from social media debacles?
First of all: use social media, but mainly on top of the sales funnel - to acquire leads and build brand awareness. Take care, however, that each such "lead" (potential customer) should be (sooner rather than later) pushed down the funnel - from social media to your mailing list. Use social media to build your mailing list, and then nurture the relationship with your leads through newsletters. Building your entire potential customer base exclusively on social media is VERY RISKY - for several reasons:
- Just like yesterday - social media can have a "problem" and then you do not have access to your potential customers
- They can also block your accounts when they want to - and again you lose access to your database
- Leaving apocalyptic scenarios aside - social media are also very unstable when it comes to algorithms - cutting organic reach all the time, blocking access to accounts at will, etc.
For most posts nowadays, for example on Facebook, organic reach is below 5%. This means that for 100 of your fans only 5 have the chance to see your post at all, because Facebook algorithms will display the post only to five of them:
And will they actually see the posts? You have no influence upon it (and you do not have too much to check it, because even in Insights you cannot see who specifically saw the post – unlike with the email list, where you can check exactly who opened and clicked on links in your emails – and when).That is why I personally think that it is safest to lead potential clients from social media to your mailing list. How can you go about it, though?
How to use social media to collect subscribers, and thus "lead" your leads down the sales funnel?
There are some ways 😉
- Offer a downloadable ‘freebie’ those who follow you on your Facebook page and to the members of the group some valuable materials to download from the landing page after subscribing to your newsletter
- Organize a webinar/ Go Live and collect newsletters from the participants of the webinar via a landing page (with a subscription to the newsletter - however, this must be clearly stated for the subscription to be in line with the GDPR)
- After the webinar, give the participants an opportunity to download notes from the webinar / or the webinar video - from your landing page - also provided that they subscribe to your newsletter;
- Offer your followers a free email course
- Start a closed group on FB and ask for an e-mail as a condition for joining the group in questions (a bit radical, but on the other hand you’d be better off with just a handful of really determined people in the group, than a whole bunch of spammers and ‘dead souls’.
- Use a "Pinned post" on Twitter and Facebook page to advertise your free email course subscription
- Use Facebook Lead Generation Ads to collect email subscribers.
Hope this helps you prepare yourself – and your business – for the next social media debacle. Do you have any other ideas how you can protect yourself from future social media outages? Let us know in the comments! And don't forget to have a look at our post about social media content strategy + join our Social Media Academy!
