How Will Facebook’s Difficult Week Affect Digital Marketing?

Last week was a more difficult one than usual for Facebook. On Sunday, October 3, a whistleblower appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the troves of damning internal documents she obtained during her tenure at the company. On Tuesday, she appeared before U.S. Congress to shed more light on the health and safety risks Facebook’s platforms pose to users. Andrew Marantz neatly summed up those risks in an article for the New Yorker: “Facebook makes millions of its users more angry, more confused, and more psychologically frail.”

On Monday, between Haugen’s two appearances, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp crashed for a period of hours. The parent company’s stock plummeted, Mark Zuckerberg lost nearly $7 billion (on paper), and analysts calculated company losses between $3.3 million (Standard Media Index) and $100 million ().

The impact on advertisers was perhaps more dire. Millions of brands were affected; some saw week-over-week sales decline between 30 and 70 per cent, according to the .

The outage should serve as a reminder of the importance of channel diversity to successful digital marketing. Too many companies rely solely on Facebook and Instagram to reach customers – those companies were seriously hurt by the crash. An inclusive digital marketing campaign that combines social media marketing with a healthy mix of paid search, SEO, display, etc. will give you a better chance of reaching your customers, even if most of your audience spends its time on Instagram. You’ll also be protected in the unlikely case of another protracted outage.

At GrowthEngine Media, we provide a diverse set of digital marketing services, including SEO, paid search, social media, local search, content marketing, reputation management work, website development, and live chat. We believe that a combination of these services is preferrable to placing all your digital marketing eggs in a single basket. Reach out today to discuss your strategy.

Image: Brett Jordan via Unsplash

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