Lessons Learned From Todays Facebook and Instagram Crash

They are also things we need to expect from a platform we don’t own, and that we use, in large part, for free. Something I learned early on, that has alleviated a lot of my frustration, is that nothing in life is free.

If I am using a service or platform that I didn’t build, and I am not paying for it monetarily, I am going to pay for it another way. Through privacy, control or something else. It’s just how it works. 

By the way, your email marketing platform goes in this category too! Don’t count on them to keep your list of email subscribers up to date. If you aren’t exporting your subscriber list on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on list growth, you are exposing yourself to potential disaster.

• Next, and just as important, always have more than one lead generation method active. As millions of Facebook advertisers have just found out, if you don’t have a secondary lead generation method, you are at the mercy of someone else for your business growth.

We get so reliant on FB advertising that we often just assume they will always be around. 

But what if they aren’t? What if they have an outage that lasts longer than a few hours? (It’s been ~4 hours and counting today) Would your business continue to grow?

Just as a growing business would never hire only one salesperson and have no backup plan for when that salesperson is out sick, a business should never have one advertising source with not backup plan for when that source goes down.

• Do not run a paid membership solely on Facebook groups. I have heard from countless people today who are frustrated by the fact that they cannot access their paid groups because they are delivered solely through Facebook.

While Facebook is a great ancillary service to a paid group, it is simply not reliable enough to be the primary delivery mechanism of your paid group. You need to build a membership area that you can use to deliver your products and services, answer questions from your members, and keep them up to date on the benefits of their purchase.

By the way, this is great advice for anyone running a membership group OR a challenge! What would you do if Facebook went down when you were getting ready to run a challenge? I just heard of someone who had to postpone a challenge for 10K people today.

• Remember, Facebook Messenger is not a replacement for keeping in touch with those you love. With Messenger down many of us can’t reach out to our loved ones. How many people do you talk to on a regular basis that you don’t even have their cell phone numbers?

This is a good reminder for us all to update our address database and make sure our phone numbers and addresses are current for those we care about. It might even be a good reminder to start sending out snail mail cards again. 😉

• Were you more productive today? Time with social media not working is a good time to assess how much time you lose on social media during the day. Some people, I would even say most people, are familiar with the feeling of getting lost in social media land for hours.

How much more productive were you when Facebook was down today than you are on a “normal” day? Some people have mastered how to stay active on FB for business and not have it tank their productivity. But not many of us have that down yet. 

Notice how much more you got done today, and consider what would happen if you got that all done every day. How much further would your business be, without counting on a third party platform to grow?

• As the outage continues more and more services are being impacted. Which begs the question, do you have your client and prospect snail mail addresses? What if the internet as a whole, or our major email providers like msn and gmail go down? (Gmail is experiencing partial outages as we speak)

Are you still able to talk to your clients? Can you still sell to your prospects? But, isn’t getting snail mail addresses harder than getting email addresses? Of course it is! And it’s worth it! 

Imagine being able to contact your prospects and clients when you need to, regardless of what services are working or not. How much more power would you have if you could reach out to them through any channel? 

So how do you get that information? Well, you ask for it. But you have to have a compelling reason. Maybe you like to send out goodies for birthdays, or just because. Or maybe you send a welcome postcard to all new subscribers. Whatever it is, give them a reason to share, then follow through.

• Always, always remember it’s the personal connection that builds a business. It is not your email list, or your Facebook friends list, or your likes on Instagram. It is the personal connection.

And if you have a personal connection with your list, you will always be able to reach them. You may need to get creative in your outreach methods, but your prospects and clients will be receptive.

There are certain people I follow that, if they reached out by snail mail or phone, I would be thrilled and would stop everything to see what they had to say. There are others who may pique my interest via email occasionally, but I wouldn’t bother to pull out and open an envelope from them. Which bucket do you want to be in for your tribe?

The universe is a funny thing. I was watching The Rookie last night, one of my guilty pleasures, and the main characters (a couple of police officers) had disabled the bad guy’s car. Thinking they had outsmarted the thief they were rather cocky about their ingenuity.

As she walked out and saw the “boot” on her car she laughed and got on her motorcycle and said confidently “my backup plans have backup plans.”

And today is a great example of why we should all take our plans so seriously. If we, as above board business owners, created contingency plans with the same passion that the thief in last night’s episode did, there would be much less panic today and many more smiling business owners.