The problem with the outage is that it only affected a select few countries and if your country wasn’t one of them – you might not even know Facebook and it’s other associated networks Instagram & WhatsApp went down.
Hopefully entering the media cycle brings more awareness on the fact that many business owners don’t have much of a future-proofed digital marketing strategy outside of the Facebook ecosystem.
Earlier in the year it came to light that Facebook took down 1.3 billion fake accounts in Oct-Dec last year and while many business owners will have no problem getting their users back on board with new content or features, there are others who might not be so lucky.
There’s an easy fix for those who want to ensure their digital marketing strategy is future proofed:
Get out from under the thumb of the big tech companies. I know this sounds like a crazy statement coming from someone who works in social media, but bear with me and keep reading! Let’s take a look at some numbers:
YouTube has more than 2 billion logged-in monthly users against $1.79 billion users who visit Facebook daily this doesn’t take into account the users that aren’t logged into YouTube because the platform can be accessed without creating a login.
While we’re talking about platforms, there are more than 1.7 million merchants reported who sell using the Shopify platform; the platform processed $5.1 billion in sales in 2020.
More than 1 million websites are built on WordPress.
These numbers mean there are a lot of people out there less reliant on a single source such as Facebook. The beauty of the internet – it’s not a monopoly and it’s key to diversify your risk, especially when it comes to social media platforms that control our content and data, which leads me to my next point:
Facebook’s market dominance is coming to an end.
Controversial, I know. The largest active age group on Facebook now is 25–34 year olds with users 35+ years dropping rapidly.
There are more people leaving than joining.
A lot of this has to do with content discovery and the onslaught of fake news that has been pushed through our feeds. Users started migrating their pages to Twitter and Instagram where they control the algorithms and therefore get better content discovery for their audience.
This isn’t good news for Facebook because these platforms can’t monetize as well as Facebook.
For many years I was an advocate and defender for Facebook, I’m in the digital marketing industry so it makes sense that I would back the tools but as the tool gets bigger and drowns themselves into the metaverse of things they have created a snake that eats its own tail.
Over the past 3 years out of the last 10 as a team we’ve spent more time doing technical diagnostics and support for accounts that have fallen victim to cyber attacks than the actual marketing job we WANT to do, we’re tired and a little bit over it.
It’s increasingly clear these companies don’t have much regard for their customers or their businesses; they’ve proven time and time again they value profit over anything else. If Facebook goes down again like it did today, how do you think your business will survive?
