Alyssa Mullins 0:00
Hi, everyone! I’m Alyssa.
Preston Snyder 0:01
I’m Preston.
Alyssa Mullins 0:02
And welcome to your weekly social!
Oh. So that happened.
Something happened earlier this week. I don’t know if you noticed….
Preston Snyder 0:16
No, I don’t think anybody really noticed; they really went under the radar this week
Alyssa Mullins 0:20
So discreet, didn’t even notice it.
Preston Snyder 0:21
Call it a blackout, even.
Alyssa Mullins 0:25
So if you didn’t know, there were some social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger-
Preston Snyder 0:34
All of the Facebook owned suite of apps.
Alyssa Mullins 0:37
All of those went down on Monday-
Preston Snyder 0:41
For right about eight hours. A painstaking, really, what do I do with my life, uncomfortable hours.
Alyssa Mullins 0:49
Yeah, for eight hours, all of their websites were down, their apps were down. Pretty much everything was just- you could not access it at all.
Preston Snyder 0:59
How’d you find out about it?
Alyssa Mullins 1:01
Well, part of my job is I go on social media, and I do stuff for clients and for us internally. So when I typed in Facebook it said that I could not go on Facebook; I don’t remember the error, but I thought the internet itself was down. I thought our Wi-Fi wasn’t working. And so I kept refreshing, and I tried other websites, and everything else seemed to be okay. And I was like, “Okay, the internet’s working… enough. What’s going on?” And then I did some more searching and I realized that the servers were down for Facebook, and all Facebook owned apps.
Preston Snyder 1:35
Did you go where everybody else went?
Alyssa Mullins 1:38
I don’t know, where did I go?
Preston Snyder 1:40
Twitter.
Alyssa Mullins 1:41
I may or may not have gone on Twitter later on. So everything was down. A lot of people went straight to Twitter to figure out what’s going on, to kind of just see if anybody else knew, if you guys saw any good memes, there were some pretty fun memes made out of it. Outside of why it happened and all the other stuff going on there, there was an interesting impact on small businesses. A lot of them seem to kind of struggle with posting content and with what to do in those eight hours that they kind of just like, did not have access to anything. To their customers, to their followers- to anyone.
Preston Snyder 2:28
There’s a really decent amount of people too that, it’s almost as though they lost a full business day, due to the blackout.
Alyssa Mullins 2:37
You know, even on my personal account, I follow some local businesses; they all were just on Twitter, they’re like, “I can’t post anything on my Facebook or on my Instagram.” And, you know, “I was supposed to announce a big sale coming up. And I was supposed to do these things.” And it really kind of reminded myself with part of my job being involved with social media, that social media is great to have as part of your marketing strategy. But it shouldn’t be your only strategy. And that really kind of reminded me of that, as I was looking into it a bit more and trying to figure out almost what to do with my day while I was here.
Preston Snyder 3:21
There was a lot of panic, a lot of people that weren’t able to give it well. And part of that is, we like the philosophy of “We need more than one avenue.” We are a big fan of email marketing. Typically, your email list is generally something people can’t take from you. So if a website goes down, a whole platform goes down in a major area, if you’re still able to send emails to people and be like, “Well, everything’s gone, but we’ll do a flash sale that day or something.” While there was a lot of brands that took this kind of like a shot in the foot, just not able to move and very vocal about it. There were some other brands that were able to pivot rather well.
Alyssa Mullins 4:13
Fashion Nova was one of them. They kind of followed everyone and went straight to Twitter. But instead of saying, “What’s going on what do we do?” They said “Hey, you know Facebook, Instagram all of these apps might be down, but our website is still up!” and you know if you’re kind of like me and you’re like well I mean I can’t go on this social media and I can’t do this… I guess I’ll online shop. Which may not be the best route for my finances, but it’s it’s another route to take. And they did that really well. They said, “Hey, we’re still here. And you can still get access to us through Twitter and then to our website,” which was really done really well.
Preston Snyder 4:53
Yeah. utilizing those other options is fantastic. It was a really weird and bad day for Facebook. They had a whistleblower come out, there’s a 60 Minutes interview that was launched coming out with several really pointed accusations about the way Facebook conducts itself internally. Of course, stock prices, a lot of other things for Facebook plummeted, as they were unable to use their service for only one day. And you know, Mark Zuckerberg lost like $7 billion for a single day outage of his products; there are governments in the coming weeks, that, in light of the leaks and the blackout, “We’re too reliant, they need to be broken up,” kind of a trustbusters scenario. And the kind of overall sentiment of, “Was it a bad thing that Facebook went down? Was it a bad thing, that Facebook came back?” We’re not really here to get into the nitty gritty of the philosophy behind “Is Facebook good or not?” But on the heels of that, because it happened once and this isn’t the first time it’s happened either- it can also happen again. Make sure that you are able to pivot, make sure that you have another way out, that your website’s in good working order. If you have other avenues, such as Google, whether you do Google ads, or YouTube, or you have another flow of content, those are the things you want to make sure you invested in. Don’t spread yourself too thin, but if one area of your stuff plummets, collapses, and you lose a whole business day like this… if you can walk away unscathed, you’re doing a great job.
Alyssa Mullins 6:42
And that’s for small businesses. And even if you’re a content creator, where a lot of your stuff does rely on social media, it is good to make sure that you have your bases covered. So small businesses, websites, email marketing, and social media, those are kind of a good three to get yourself adjusted so that if one goes down, you can rely on the other two. If two go down, you have at least one more that you can let everybody know, “Hey, we’re okay! Everything’s going good.” And just keep people updated. Content creators, you know, you have platforms that do and don’t go down. Sometimes Instagram gets finicky, sometimes Facebook is finicky. Sometimes they both go down. And so just being able to take what you have and transition to another platform.
Preston Snyder 7:34
For example, if you’re on TikTok,everyone’s trying to emulate TikTok. So if you have everything in your TikTok account, make sure it’s on YouTube, make sure it’s on Instagram, make sure it’s on Facebook. So even if you lose half, like we did on Monday, you still have the other two widely used platforms, which in the case of that got even more attention than usual. Because, “Oh, no, I can’t use this platform. I’m gonna go to the next one.”
Alyssa Mullins 7:58
Twitter did welcome everybody to their platform as it happened, which was funny.
Preston Snyder 8:02
Literally everyone.
Alyssa Mullins 8:03
Yeah, it’s good to kind of just reevaluate your marketing strategy. And just make sure that your bases are covered in times like this that we saw earlier this week. And just making sure that you’re covered, you’re good to go, you and your business are good, and that you don’t miss out on a whole work day. Because it’s not fun to miss out on a workday, especially when you weren’t planning on it.
Preston Snyder 8:23
It can be disruptive.
Alyssa Mullins 8:24
It ca,n and it can throw off your plans, but your ability to kind of pause, reevaluate and adjust where you need to is going to benefit you and your business in the long run.
Preston Snyder 8:40
And that being said, if you need any help evaluating your current business strategy, then give us a visit at PullmanMarketing.com! We’d love to help you walk through what you’re doing well, and areas you’d like to grow and expand. And thank you for watching the Weekly Social! Be sure to like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, and we’ll see you next week.
Alyssa Mullins 9:02
Follow us on social media- that too! So that. All of them just in case a couple other go down,
Preston Snyder 9:09
Please.
