Facebook Server Down| How does it impact our digital marketing strategies?
Facebook, the social media giant, on its one of the longest ever global outage, went down for nearly 6 hours. Apart from the huge roar it created amidst its user base of $2.89 billion users (estimated monthly), it has also caused an economic loss of estimated $60 million (Source) just to the company and a personal wealth loss of $7 billion (Source)to the social media giant’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But most importantly, it had created a huge disruption across businesses/industries/non-profits and all kinds of organisations across the globe, whose economic impact is yet to be assessed.
Social media giants like Facebook who owns three major social networking sites has become the lifeline of the operations of many organisations across the world. Facebook and Google has almost captured the entire digital marketing space. In 2020, 40 billion U.S. dollars were spent just on social media marketing constituting 91.9% of the total marketing spent of USA.(Source)
Various accounts of major business losses have started to surface across the globe from yesterday’s outage and this has really raised the question to the world of marketing, ‘How sustainable it is to set-up a social media based digital marketing strategy?’ The power and responsibility of the Social Media Giants lies on a tiny number of people without much transparency and accountability and history has always proved that it is not a good idea. So how can we still have a sustainable and beneficial digital media strategy while not keeping all our balls in one court?
A Thought through Digital Marketing Strategy- Long Term Vision and Calculated Risk:
One of the key essence of any good marketing strategy is adapting to the time and recent trends. However, with a social media focused marketing strategy, we tend to get distracted by the fast-trend digital world and ignore a zoomed out perspective, which is essential to keep the strategy relevant for a longer period of time. While creating our digital marketing strategy, we should evaluate the long term risk associated with each platform and share the weightage on each platforms equally. For example, in reference to Fakebook’s yesterday’s outage, we should keep in mind that there is always a possibility of a next time and if that happens, how much loss our business/organisation will suffer and how can we diversify the risk while ensuring efficient utilisation of Facebook at present.
NEVER EVER IGNORE THE WEBSITE:
Our websites are literally our portal with the outer world and it needs our sincere effort all the time, be it an e-commerce platform or an educational institution. A website which has been built to meet the need of its target audience in the most effective manner always wins! With or without social media. Focus on SEO not just from Google’s perspective but from all aspects ( elaborated on the next point). The world of digital media needs to remember, websites are the only tool we have in the digital marketing world, that is entirely under our control and it carries the ultimate power to make it or break it for us in the digital world.
SEO- Always remember SEO is key and not just from a Google perspective:
We almost always strategies our SEO from only Google Perspective. While Google is nearly a monopoly with 87.75% of the online search volume and market as of June 2021, with rising awareness around data privacy and open sourcing, other search engines like Microsoft Bing, Apache Lucene, AOL are gaining slow but steady momentum. In a more practical way, it means, though keep on giving Google a major weightage on your SEO strategy, do start to slowly pull in others as well.
Never forget the traditions: At any point of our organization’s marketing journey, we should divert away from the traditional means of digital marketing; Email Marketing, Integrator Marketing, SMS Marketing.
Digital Marketing is an ocean:
It’s important to reach consumers through a variety of channels to reinforce brand recognition and drive conversions. Each channel supports the others and compounds, almost exponentially, the results for your brand. — Molly Phillips, director of client strategy, Roar Media.
In Digital Marketing Strategy, especially if we are a small to medium organisation, we don’t generally consider using other channels like Spotify, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc. They are platforms used by a massive number of users and also offers the opportunity as a marketplace not just through paid channels but organic content as well. Example, Pinterest can be a great place for clothing startup to organically get thousands of leads through unique and visually attractive content.
In conclusion, marketing is exactly like investing;
- They vary in performance over time,
- They are subjected to sudden events
- The market is always changing
- They can make or break your/an organisation’s life
Hence, let’s make our marketing strategies not just trendy but also sustainable and regenerative by diversification of focus, calculated risk and keeping an upper hand with ourselves.
