Facebook and Instagram disappeared from the internet’s public space in the early afternoon on Monday, October 4, 2021, causing a mixture of emotions between creatives and business owners alike. Should we stand up and cheer or should we be worried about our company’s brand awareness?
The last time the social media giant experienced an outage was in March 2019, but never has an outage occurred where one disruption caused the downfall of its sister apps. Additionally, the outage came at an unprecedented time in Facebook’s history as they face intense scrutiny from Frances Haugen, the so-called “Facebook Whistleblower”, who publicly revealed Facebook’s hidden knowledge of the social and physical harm it causes its users. These actions and more spurred the inevitable thought among business leaders and community members: If Facebook and Instagram are gone, how do I digitally market my business?
The question is valid, and if we’re being quite honest, the impact these social platforms have on our organization is immense, thus, there is much at stake in their success. Before the outage, the Salem Chamber held 1,919 Instagram followers and over 5,000 on Facebook, two of the largest audiences known to our organization. Luckily, these two platforms aren’t the only form of communication/digital marketing we rely on. As a matter of fact, they’re second in line to the true Master of Modern Marketing:
The Blog – A Digital Marketer’s Farm
In 2021, it may seem old hat to upload content to a blog. Yet some legacy traditions are the only foundations which keep the abode of information from breaking. A blog combines the best of the new and the old, the analog and the digital. It bridges the unforeseen gap which Facebook and Instagram have created. And as recent news dictates, works FOR your business rather than against it.
A blog is a digital space, located in an easily accessible area on your website, where your business uploads any and all content intended for distribution to your audience. This could be upcoming events, press releases, feature articles, interviews, videos, podcasts––basically all the current forms of media, but hosted in one hub. Your blog, which houses ALL your consumer content, is the key to your company’s digital presence.
Google, the one true search engine giant of the modern digital industry, utilizes Web Crawlers (sometimes referred to as Spiders) to search the internet with the intent of indexing information. It is here where the meaning behind your company’s blog comes into full view. These Web Crawlers scan the internet searching for keywords which can be found in the content you created, and the focus keyword target you set in your blog post’s creation. Essentially, the words you use in your blog posts are imperative with current and future customers finding your web/product hosting site. Ensuring that your content is Search Engine Optimized (SEO), becomes paramount in helping your stakeholders find your site. If all this sounds like science fiction or thickly laid gobbledygook, you’re right! But that’s the name of the game in the digital landscape.
Moreover, when you invest in your blog, you partner with the most effective piece of digital marketing today: The email. When you send out your email blasts to your prospective clients or current customers, make sure that every piece of content is hosted on your blog. This will, in turn, drive more traffic to your site and ultimately lead to more sales for you and your valued team members. This also allows you to employ conversion tracking in your email marketing, a must-have for all businesses hoping to get the most return on their marketing investments. A combined broadcast strategy like this not only centralizes your content, but it also instills a sense of ownership with the folks working behind the scenes to create your content.
This significant outage event, although momentarily over, does not dispel the question that remains: what do we do when all that we’ve done is no longer viable? Like all great leaders, we improvise. We pivot. We innovate. We create. We use what we have, sharpen what we can, and hope for the best in the end. Because once the dust settles on what we’ve done, the last thing we want to say is that we could have done more. But with your trusty blog, the unsung hero of the digital marketplace, the prospect of a better tomorrow is, for the time being, still a horizon that ceases to be labeled elusive.