In the wake of the Facebook apocalypse, what else can you rely on?

After the recent Facebook and Instagram server crash, we’re exploring how you can be more in control of your marketing efforts, and how you can rely less on outside social media for your business’s success.

March’s social media outage left a lot of small business owners wondering… if Facebook and Instagram disappeared right now, what would be left of our marketing efforts? You can’t afford to put all of your eggs in one basket, as they say.

The fact is – you don’t “own” your Facebook fans or Instagram followers. And you never will! Unlike a mailing list or CRM where you have control over the information you have on your users, these users on social media can be taken away at any time. By a social media outage, by a concentrated effort from the platforms to “clean up” inactive users or by some other means. So how can you combat this in your small business? Here are three tried and tested tips to ensure that your business is still at the forefront of people’s minds in an era when certain social media platforms could disappear at any point:

Build your email list:

Make a serious effort to build your email list. Having a signup area on your website, as well as promoting your mailing list at expos you attend is really important! It’s important to keep on top of this in our industry as relevant mailing list users drop off fairly quickly as people only plan a wedding for a limited time frame!

Up your SEO efforts:

Making sure your website is as SEO friendly as possible is really important. Making sure you have it all set up right by a professional web designer, and they have a strong background in SEO is the best way to achieve this, and then having an ongoing strategy to target keywords through a blog/your CMS is ideal.

Be present on a range of platforms:

Not pigeonholing yourself into one or two platforms is the best way to go. If all you have set up to drive traffic or enquiries to your business is a Facebook page and one day it crashes – then where are you left? Having a diverse range of platforms that you’re present on, know how to use and are making the most of is really important. Having a great website, a couple of social media platforms, your Easy Weddings storefront and some paid per click advertising like Google Ads is a great way to diversifying your marketing spend, for example.

Read more tips on other ways to market to couples here.