At The End Of The Day, It's Your Business

My son Tom was hilarious as a toddler and grew quite the following amongst my pals on Facebook as I would regularly post his increasingly funny quips on my timeline - he was incredibly observant and constantly making me laugh, he was amazing to be around (and still is :-)).  

These comments would gain fantastic levels of engagement, to the point that my mates even started to suggest that I should write a book detailing all of the amusing things he'd randomly come out with. 

Then one year for my birthday, Claire incredibly kindly spent hours trawling through my Facebook timeline and creating that very book, a one-off physical copy, just for me, which I still treasure and enjoy looking through. 

Tom's about to turn 14 and recently set himself up with a Facebook account, and so for the last few weeks I've been looking at my 'On This Day' memories daily and tagging him in anything funny that he said.

But something happened yesterday that made me feel even more thankful for that book...

Facebook and Instagram went down. 

And stayed down. 

For hours. 

And it got me thinking, that if Facebook and Instagram disappeared forever, then so do all of those photos, comments and memories. 

We've become incredibly reliant on this stuff just being there for us online when we want it - it's nothing like the three boxes of photos, books, school reports and toys I've got in my loft from when I was a kid - it's all in the cloud. 

As are many businesses - a huge amount of whom rely on Social Media for their income. 

An income which for three hours yesterday afternoon, was paused. 

I've banged this drum a lot, but I make no apologies for re-iterating the massive importance of having multiple marketing pillars for your business and not being over-reliant on just one or two. 

But in particular when it comes to Social Media accounts - as you have literally no control over whether they're off or on, up or down - and I've genuinely seen a few businesses over the years lose access to their accounts, lose their accounts altogether or see algorithm changes which have decimated their audience overnight. 

The beauty of your website and your mailing list are that they are yours to keep and combined with other forms of marketing can open up additional revenue streams that mean you're not overly reliant on something that can switch off in a heartbeat and potentially switch your business off with it. 

Peter and I covered this in a video a few months ago and if you've got fourteen minutes to spare today then you can give it a watch here (presuming YouTube is working of course :-))