Are All Your Eggs In One (Social Media) Basket?

It’s 2021, and due to world events and our addiction to our little cellular computer devices that are glued to our hands 24/7, we are more and more living on social media. LIVING ON IT. ADDICTED and getting ALL OUR NEWS, ALL OUR SHOPPING, and ALL OUR INTERACTION off of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

But the multiple glitches and outages need to teach us something. I’m fortunate that I have a mix of clients, some are old school and don’t do very much social media or digital marketing. Is that a missed opportunity? Yes and no. Because guess what? They didn’t really care or notice when Facebook and Instagram were down for 6 hours. They didn’t miss sales, they didn’t miss messages, they didn’t lose customer conversations or data. Their videos and customer lists don’t live on social media. They kept right on rolling.

I tell businesses to not rely on social media. YOU DON’T OWN IT. A famous quote says “don’t build your castle on rented land.” I have a good friend and client who lost her business (30k followers) and her personal FB accounts. For no reason, she works in a very benign industry, doesn’t post political posts, doesn’t post with animals or controversial topics/images, doesn’t post memes. Just poof! Can’t get it back. No reason given. Luckily that isn’t how she made her sales, but she’s out 10 years of information and candid pics from events, not to mention her family photos. That can happen to anyone! Try to get ahold of someone at Facebook to get your account back.

It is easy for a small business to get sucked into hosting everything online. They make it very easy! You can use your phone to quickly take pics and sell product and or post cute videos. But when those items only live on your social media, or your customer conversations only take place on messenger, you have a HUGE risk. Your business can literally be gone overnight with all your assets lost.

You NEED to own your own land. Build a website and keep it up to date with product, blogs, etc, host your photos and videos on other, less volatile “land.” Back up your assets to YOUR cloud or hard drive (or both). And do other types of marketing. Marketing existed before social media. Please take time to collect emails, communicate with customers offline, build email lists, attend or sponsor events, cultivate PR, editorial, print, build up your SEO and e-commerce on hosted sites that you own. These are all other tactics. Especially, take your customer data off-line. Or at least to a place that you have PAID and OWN. So if social media deletes you, you can pick up and not lose a beat or your entire pipeline of customers.

Don’t put all your eggs or sales in one basket. Relying on social media is a very risky place to be. I use integrated marketing tactics to build my customers a robust marketing strategy using many tactics that build upon each other. If one tactic fails, we have assets that we OWN, to build another funnel and communicate with our customers and potential customers in a variety of methods, each building upon the others. Social media is a fun and exciting place to market, but the party is built on quicksand.