Why Social Media Cannot Be Your End All, Be All

Last week it seemed that everything was at a standstill as social media junkies everywhere realized that Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were all down. Like everyone else, I rushed over to Twitter and spent most of my time watching people and businesses respond to the six hour long outage. For social media marketers everywhere, this provided a well deserved break, but also was a source of panic for businesses whose main marketing channel is social media. For a lot of businesses, not being able to promote their content on social media led to not only a decrease in engagement but also a decrease in sales that they could not have accounted for. This brings up the question of if we have gotten too far away from our traditional marketing channels and have begun to rely too heavily on social media.

Now that businesses everywhere have been reminded not to put all of their marketing eggs in one basket, I’m sure they are coming up with a contingency plan to keep something like this from ever affecting their business again. Yes, Instagram and Facebook are amazing and easy ways to reach a large audience, but we cannot forget all of the other options at our fingertips. For example, email marketing is something that will always be effective. By collecting your customer information and the email addresses of your site visitors, you can reach your audience directly with the same targeted messaging that you would be able to post on social media. Also, let’s not forget about paid advertising, that allows you to not only target potential customers based on their specific interests and demographics, but you will also be able to reach them wherever and whenever they may be scrolling through the net. 

If your brand doesn’t have other marketing channels outside of a great Instagram set up, here is a sign to invest in expanding your marketing methods.