On 4 October 2021, a major social media blackout for six hours affected billions of users worldwide. Nearly 2.85 billion active users of Facebook, 390.1 million WhatsApp active users, 1 billion Instagram active users worldwide could not access these platforms. It has lead to a loss of $7 billion for Mark Zuckerberg with a fall of 4.9% of shares.
Unfortunately, this outage was the longest blackout since 2008, when Facebook faced a downtime due to a bug that disrupted and made the site offline for about 24 hours, affecting 80 million users that day. Such mishaps proved the importance of social media marketing, especially for small business enterprises who use this platform to generate leads and stay connected with their target audiences.
All companies offering digital marketing services rely on social media platforms as every click is money for them and the business owners too. Needless to say, most of them faced some losses. It is because most small businesses rely on these three platforms for their revenue.
Let’s discuss the advantages of Social Media Marketing Services-
1) Cost-Saving Strategy
Social media marketing strategies prove to be more cost-effective than other digital marketing strategies. You can sign up and open an account for your business handle and manage posts for your business and brand at ease. There is no additional cost or charges required on these platforms, but you want to promote any post, there are equivalent packages and prices for the same, and as per your requirements, you choose what fits your brand and business the most.
2) Easy Customer Engagement
On every social media platform, millions of users and viewers visit at regular intervals. You can easily position your brand and business through a page or business account and reach millions at one go. You can insert hyperlinks so that when they view a product, it can easily land them on your e-commerce website. This in return, increases your website engagement and helps you to target the audience and lock them with your brand.
3) Global Network
Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are used worldwide and can connect your business and brand with different communities. This global reach is beneficial for your social media marketing and is one of the most important aspects of connecting with your audience.
On the other hand, when your audience needs to know about you and wants to visit your page or website, social media acts as a bridge between you and your potential client to be on the page. And indeed, this smooth chain of communication is the easiest and most chosen path in the internet era.
Social media with its global reach and easily accessible platforms with millions of viewers every minute, give a fair chance for your e-commerce to be more active. Every viewer is busy grasping content every day, and carefully inserting your brand and business will widen your scope to increase engagement and drive traffic into your e-commerce page and website easily.
4) Optimized SEO Rankings
Digital marketing is not only limited to websites and engaging content and blogs. Your online business needs to be an active member on all social media platforms. It is because it needs to have a daily presence for retaining potential clients.
You need to include trending hashtags, create exclusive content, post regularly, and other strategies that will enhance your digital dogma creatively. All these strategies help in optimizing SEO rankings on Google SERPS and e-commerce websites so you can trend with your customers with just the internet in your hands.
5) Easy Operation and Accessibility
With social media platforms, you can easily operate and handle your business page and account with robust tools and designs. These platforms are more accessible and are easy to use for promoting your business and brand online. You only need to create enticing posts and feed them to your audience maintaining the quality and aesthetic vibes to contour your brand image. Your viewers can easily click on the products they like and reach out to your website, and the rest is just a seamless experience.
6) Increases Brand Loyalty
Social media platforms help brands and businesses blend in with their customers and viewers so that they can have a loyal clientele with the most engaging tools that these platforms provide. The social media handles give insight and notify you of every change, even with the customers, so that your brand and business have a value imbued that overlaps the viewer’s preference too.
7) Customer Retention
Social media platforms help in retaining customers easily with their easily accessible business pages and other tools where millions of users are joining and connecting every minute globally. Social presence creates a smooth bridge for the viewers to reach you and take note of their satisfaction using your products. When you post your customer’s reviews after they are affiliated with your brand, you can easily retain your customers and have a valued clientele.
Where 90% of all businesses use social media marketing, this worldwide outage made us realize that every business connected on these platforms faced a setback and could not connect nor post on their target schedule which lead to a huge impact on their business target.
Some of the added risks of social media outage could be jotted as follows-
1) Missing out their Target Scheduled Post
Behind each social media post, there is a business target that needs to be fulfilled. This outage for a long duration made each of the businesses go backward on their scheduled posts to achieve their daily target. This may dent their business for a few hours and though we can put it back on track.
2) Huge Investments are made behind each post
Every social media post incurs huge investments like most of the companies use rented servers, invest in the creative team and digital marketing agencies t put out the best for their audience. This outage risked it all and made all business owners realize how much risk they can face when social media goes dark.
3) The gap in the Communication Bridge
Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are major social media platforms where every business owner interacts with their customers and audience. The outage created a gap in this communication channel and blurred out the seamless user experience. There was no responding to the customers and their queries for six long hours and that made every online business realize the risk involved here.
4) Time and Energy Involved in the Due Process
There is a lot of time and energy involved in creating each post and making it a success in reaching its target audience. Each team- creative, marketing, digital, and experts put out a post to increase their website engagement and interact with their audience to drive traffic. This blackout risked this effective step into a blunt session for every enterprise.
Social media platforms are the best digital marketing strategies with the use of the internet worldwide. With the outage on 4 October 2021, we have learned the value and risk involved in using the social media platforms- Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Especially the small business owners and budding entrepreneurs realized the pros and cons of social media marketing in all sectors of the economy.