Yesterday’s Facebook outage is a good wake up call for businesses and organizations. Are you putting all your digital marketing eggs in a single basket? That’s never a good idea. While social media can be an incredible tool, the ground can shift quite suddenly—just ask Donald Trump.
There are inherent problems to building on a platform you don’t control.
Facebook is absolutely the gorilla in the room, and it’s tempting to do all your marketing there. But despite Facebook’s dominance, things can change. It could be less dramatic than a major outage (which could even happen to a platform you own) or a high-profile ejection. It could be something as innocuous as a change in the algorithm, and suddenly your traffic is cut in half (or worse).
So what do you do?
- Create your own digital hub that you own and control. Get a website and own it. If you’re cranking out content, put it on that site. Build SEO for your own site, not Facebook.
- It’s OK to be on different social media platforms as well—it’s smart. But never let those platforms be your only or your primary channel. Make sure they’re always pointing back to your website.
It’s tough to keep up with digital marketing today, but owning and controlling your own hub of operations is a classic strategy that won’t change with the fads.