Yesterday Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp went down, and the whole world so it seems, was in chaos.
After sitting together in the office and discussing our personal experience and that of our customers, we came to the following conclusions:
- Don’t put your social media eggs in one basket; bring LinkedIn and Twitter into the mix.
- For important and urgent stuff – don’t depend solely on social media. For example, keep using newswires to send out your news releases.
- Wean yourself off Facebook: move your contacts and their important information to your phone and back it up daily, not only to the cloud but also to a local hard drive, like the one on your phone or your PC.
- Move your communications from Facebook to emails, text messages, and phone calls. We think you should keep text messages to a minimum whenever possible to keep the human touch in your communication. Don’t have time to talk? Maybe you’re doing too much.
- Sales: this is where it hurt. Companies that depend on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram for sales were frozen and panicked. The lesson? Post your website address and phone number in bold on all your social media outlets. Also, send your customers to your website occasionally so they are familiar with it and know they can communicate with you through there.
One last note: for us, this outage wasn’t that bad; it was actually good because a lot of background noise was silenced for a few hours. So maybe we should silence the beeps on our phone and check our social media once every two hours – or even six.
Let your business acquaintances understand that they should pick up the phone if they have a pressing matter. And between us, – when was the last time you received a WhatsApp message that was really, seriously, urgent?