What To Do When There’s An Instagram Outage?

Tips For Marketing When Your Favorite Platform Is Down

Remember when Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp went down for several hours? It was a rough day for those who rely on these platforms to generate leads! But it highlighted an important problem about relying on social media platforms that are owned by the same business, in this case Meta.

When one of Meta’s platforms is down, they’re all down.

Outages of varying degrees happen to different platforms all the time but it can have a huge impact on your marketing and business if you rely on just one platform.

Tip Number One: Back up your content, your graphics, your captions, your videos somewhere off of social media so you have access to them whenever you need them.

It is really important to understand that anything you put on social media; any content, videos etc. is not yours; it does not belong to you and it can be taken away from you at any time. If an outage happens, a platform disappears or you get locked out for life, then all of that content is gone (along with all your followers)!

That’s why it’s important to have a backup of your captions and graphics saved elsewhere. That way, the content you worked so hard to create, can be accessed and repurposed easily should anything happen to your favourite social media platform.

Here’s a personal example: I had just done a 20 minute live stream; an error happened while I was uploading it and the whole thing disappeared. Poof, gone! That’s when I started using otter.ai to transcribe my live streams as I go so at least I have a written copy and audio recording of the content. (A side benefit is it also makes it much easier to convert the live streams into blog posts.)

Tip Number Two: Use more than one platform for your social media marketing and make sure they’re not owned by the same company. Diversify the ways you reach your audience.

Don’t rely on one social media platform exclusively. While you don’t need to be on every single platform; I suggest picking one or two (like Instagram and LinkedIn) and getting really consistent with those. When the recent Instagram outage happened, it didn’t ruin my marketing plans. That day I posted to LinkedIn and Twitter which, of course, were getting all the traffic that normally went to Instagram. These posts actually performed better than usual since everybody was visiting the available platforms while they couldn’t access their usual ones.

Tip Number Three: Have a non-social media way to reach your audience.

It’s a really good idea to have a website; a domain that you own, where you can send your audience and give them information. It doesn’t have to be fancy or complicated. You can build a one page website that gives your audience enough information to take the next step, like booking a call, sending you an email or signing up for your newsletter.

Newsletters are another great way to connect with your audience during an outage. I sent out an impromptu email during the last outage, figuring people would be needing their dopamine hit so they’d be checking their email more often. I got lots of responses which led to an even better conversation with my audience.

Keep these three tips in mind and you’ll survive the next social media outage (and maybe find out how great other platforms can be)!