Whether you are on social media or not, personal or business, there’s a big chance you heard about the 12-hour social media outage. This outage affected Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. All three social media apps are heavily used for business purposes among businesses of all sizes: small businesses and large corporations. Where does an outage of this size leave you, the business owner?
An average workday is about 8 to 9 hours. Let’s take the 12-hour outage and put it into a typical workday employee scenario. If your business is relying solely on social media for marketing and sales, this is significant. 12 business hours would essentially mean that your top performing employee did a no call, no show for the whole day. They also took part of the next morning off. Sure, you’ll get by and continue your business operations. But now, you are also having to do more work for the same results.
You are now paying the day off with PTO or paying someone overtime to not fall behind. Yet, you still have to make sure your work duties are completed in a timely manner. In other words, you are not only having to do more work, but you are also paying almost 3 times more to cover for one day than you normally would.
While it may seem to only set you back a day, it’s not about how much it’s costing your business. You need to be considering how much money you continue to lose. A loss that can be reduced by having the proper business tools to keep your business thriving.
Social Media Outage Effects
The 12-hour social media outage cost the global economy about $160 million per hour, yes, per HOUR. Small businesses that rely heavily on Facebook and its services were heavily affected and left out in the dark. More than 6 million advertisers use Facebook to promote products and services their business offer. This not only messed with analytics and posting schedules, but it also emphasized the need for a different campaign and extended timeline. When social media shut down, the digital world seemed to be running behind. The 12-hour outage meant a 12-hour window of total blackout. Products and services weren’t displayed to the consumer, causing businesses to incur massive losses.
So how does a business owner not only recover from an outage of this size, but prevent it from affecting their business again? The answer is simple, fix your marketing strategy. Social media is a powerful, free, business tool you should be taking advantage of, but your whole marketing and sales strategy shouldn’t rely on it.
Why are you using social media for your business? Whether you are trying to drive more traffic to your store, focus on e-commerce sales, establish an online presence or grow it for that matter, your business development starts with a fully-functional and easy to navigate website.
Benefits of Having a Website
Rather than thinking of your website as an additional business expense or task you need to keep up with, consider it the 24-hour per day tool. A tool that never stops working for you. Remember that employee that took 12-hours off without a heads-up or call to let you know? Your website wouldn’t do that to you and at Nationwide Southwest—America’s Marketing Group, we make sure of it.
A responsive website allows consumers to shop or browse your selection before they even come into the store. This makes it a strong asset to have on your team. With website management services that are offered, you don’t even have to lift a finger, we do the heavy lifting for you.
You hire someone to do your warehouse driving and deliveries for you, right? Let us do the driving. We not only drive your website, our marketing services drive customers directly to your store. Whether you are needing digital marketing, email marketing or more, our team of specialized digital marketing experts are here to guide you. Business growth is just one click away. Contact us today and grow your customer base. When social media has another outage, don’t be left out in the dark.