Unless you live under a rock, you know that last week Facebook and Instagram went down for hours. The first question is what happened? The second question is how does Facebook and other social media websites going down affect your small business?
If you do a little research on the issue, it appears Facebook was down due to what they call bad BGP routing and DNS issues. In layman’s terms it was just simply a traffic issue with the Internet. The good news is it doesn’t sound like it was a cyber-attack. That doesn’t help the fact that many small businesses rely on Facebook and Instagram for advertising and marketing. If you are a small business that uses social media to market, you probably were affected by the outage.
Here are some things to do next time one of the big social media platforms go down
Check to verify it’s down.
It could have just been your internet issue, an issue with your account. Check the application on other devices and other accounts to verify it’s down.
Use other Social Media platforms
With anything, its good to diversify. Make sure you don’t limit your marketing efforts to only Facebook, but use other mediums to market including other social media platforms and direct mail, etc.
Be ready for when the site comes back up
When the site comes up, use this to your advantage to post something about it and get some attention. Current events are always a good topic to use in your posts.
Schedule Posts
Use the platform’s scheduling tools to pre-plan your content and post regularly. This will help you be consistent.
I hope these tips help you feel a little better about the Facebook outage last week and give you the confidence to keep using social media to promote your small business!