Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp shut down for more than six hours on Monday. It marked the worst outage for the technology giant since 2008, when a bug knocked Facebook offline for about a day, but the service only had 80 million users then. Facebook has since grown in leaps and bound and the platform currently has 3 billion users.

For a lot of people it was like an apocalypse and it felt like the world was coming to an end. Social media breathes life into a lot of businesses and for entrepreneurs it is how they get to meet potential customers and also put out their services.

Time and time again, our landlord Mark Zuckerberg has shown us that the app is his and he can evict us without thinking twice. It’s either accounts are being blocked or the app crashes for a while.

It’s important to reach clients through other channels to reinforce brand recognition and make other prospective clients look in your direction. Here we have provided a guideline to make you effective and continue your communications in the midst of another social media outage

Company Website

Your company website is your own digital real estate, and you dictate wht appears on your site. So you may want to consider making driving traffic to your website a goal.

Using live chat on your website provides another effective way to interact with visitors and convert them to customers.

Email Marketing
Email marketing is great for taking advantage of social media outage. It is a marketing platforms which allow customers to go from seeing an offer to buying within seconds. Email newsletters can drive sales like no other channel. Marketing Week reports that email generates around £29bn retail sales annually.

Also, Email marketing doesn’t necessarily require a huge team or a lot of technical know-how in order to be successful. 

Word-of-Mouth Referrals
Word of mouth marketing as an extremely effective way to promote services can be useful in times of outages like this. People love referrals and they tend to trust the opinions of their friends when making purchasing decisions. So you want to make sure you satisfy your clients and offer them the best experience so that they can pass on the message to more people

Listings on Industry Sites
Most industries feature a variety of sites where your company’s services can be listed, offering a much more targeted approach than social media.

This is a great way to increase your business online visibility, reputation, and branding. Local business listing websites help a business to get more traffic from its target customers.

What other channels can you use to connect and engage with your customers and target audiences?

Written by Minomi Ogbe and Uriri Onojake