On this day, October 4, 2021, there was an epic shutdown and a halt on a huge community of people, and businesses around the world. Billions of people worldwide blinked out, lives were disrupted, businesses were cut off from customers, people couldn’t communicate with friends and family. Facebook and its family apps (WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram) which were used by billions of people blinked out for hours. Facebook is also used to sign in to many other applications and services, leading to people not being able to log into their TVs, websites, and other devices. This outage lasted over five hours, and this showed just how dependent the world has become on social media platforms. Facebook also had the first outage in 2019 and this happened for 24hours. This had a huge financial impact on businesses and Facebook. A lot of businesses recorded a drop in sales within this period, Facebook wasn’t excluded. Although Facebook apologized for the outage, it wouldn’t bring the time wasted and money lose from this occurrence.
Have you ever wondered what the Impact social media has on your business?
Imagine the fate of your business being tied to ‘Mark Zuckerberg’
It has been a month since Instagram disabled my business account. On this very day, I was on Instagram checking out the latest trend and suddenly, I got kicked out of my page. I tried logging in severally unfortunately, all I got were an error message. I tried sending several emails to Instagram and the response I got was to send necessary documents proving ownership of the business account. It has been over a month since this happened, till date, I am yet to get a response.
I never would have thought I would be a victim of Instagram’s brouhaha with regards to their random disabling of accounts. This has caused a major decline in bookings, visibility, and overall income. I’ve never considered having a backup page not alone having another platform for marketing my brand. It was then it dawned on me that I gave Instagram the chance to have a huge impact on my business.
As business owners and millennials, I cannot overemphasize the importance of being on multiple social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and several others. Never underestimate the power of social media marketing on a business. Social media has greatly transformed the business landscape. Instagram and Facebook are the most widely used platforms for business marketing used by billions of people around the world which provides incredible benefits that help reach clients worldwide. Knowing fully well the impact of marketing and how it helps in reaching a larger audience, I cannot help but think about the number of clients I’ve lost within these couple of weeks.
On the other hand, If I was prepared for this, I probably would have switched to other existing platforms pending when Instagram reactivates my business account. On the bright side, I’ve opened a backup page and a Twitter account. I wouldn’t wait for this to happen again because I haven’t fully recovered from the loss of my first page.
How prepared are you for the next shutdown? The forces are with you.
Lazy Youths