There are a lot of doom-and-gloom scenarios about what might happen should net neutrality be repealed in the U.S. There are several sunshine-y ones as well.
The tricky thing is: We can speculate about what might happen, but it’s really hard to know what will happen.
Without a crystal ball, the best we can do is be nimble for whatever outcome.
And part of being nimble is being prepared.
Here are a few different ways I imagine net neutrality could (emphasis on “could”) affect our Internet lives and the marketing that we do at Buffer. No action necessary on your part; I think the most important thing we can do is just talk about it and be ready for whatever.
Social media becomes so much more important
Hard to believe it could become any more important, right?
As one theory goes, once net neutrality is out of the way, major websites will either pay to move to the front of the line for faster speeds and accessibility or consumers will get the large websites by default and have to pay for anything extra beyond those sites.
This could mean that Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, etc. are just as easy to get to as always, and everything else is much harder.
If this were to happen, some people believe this might make small business websites obsolete — or at least, when faced with the choice of building a website or creating a Facebook page, small business owners will make the obvious choice. They’ll put everything on Facebook.
For us at Buffer, this would mean we’d have the chance to help educate people about how to make high quality business pages and get engagement. We can talk more about Google My Business and other new services. Perhaps the Buffer product helps more with each of these areas.
It’s a lot harder to get your blog posts seen
In a world with no net neutrality, people may have to pay more to access sites like our blog.
What does this mean for us? We’ll want to closely monitor someone’s experience going from Google search to a Buffer blog post. Can we get into more answer boxes? Does being AMP-certified make a difference?
And on social media, should we try more things like Instant Articles? Putting the content into social as natively as can be, just in case someone can’t click out to read the full article?
Email addresses remain uber-important
Email is one thing that few talk about with net neutrality. If it survives mostly in tact, then this becomes another very important channel by which to reach customers and community.
Should we be focusing more on email? Can we do everything we can today in order to make sure our email lists stay healthy?
Others
I’d love to hear if any other scenarios have been on your mind. I haven’t even touched on messaging, apps, or countless other channels.
What do you think about when you think about net neutrality and Buffer’s marketing?
