After last week’s huge Facebook changes, we’re exploring how you can be more in control of your marketing efforts, and how you can rely less on external platforms for your business’s success. Here’s how to focus on diversifying your marketing spend.
In the last couple of years, social media outages have left a lot of small business owners wondering… if Facebook and Instagram disappeared right now, what would be left of our marketing efforts? You can’t afford to put all of your eggs in one basket, as they say.
So, the recent FB ban of news related pages in Australia actually left a bunch of non-news pages without ANY posts – unable to reach their Australian audience.
This move by Facebook was prompted by the media bargaining code, which requires platforms like Facebook and Google to pay for news to be displayed on their platforms.
Many pages that were, in fact, not news/media sources were impacted, leading to many business owners lost at the thought of losing their FB platform.
Here, we’ve put together our thoughts on how to navigate this and build your own community that you can truly rely on. Although the Facebook page removals now been resolved, it’s still worth diversifying your socials to prevent being at the mercy of one platform and to maximise your reach.
How to avoid being at the mercy of platforms like Facebook
The fact is – you don’t “own” your Facebook fans or Instagram followers. And you never will!
Unlike a mailing list or CRM, where you have control over the information you have on your users, users on social media can be taken away at any time. This can happen during a social media outage, by a concentrated effort from the platforms to “clean up” inactive users or by some other means.
So, how can you combat this in your small business? Here are three tried-and-tested tips to ensure that your business is still at the forefront of people’s minds in an era when certain social media platforms could disappear at any point.
How to minimise the impact of losing one social media following
Build your email list
Make a serious effort to build your email list. Having a signup area on your website, as well as promoting your mailing list at expos you attend is critical to growing your list. It’s important to keep on top of this in our industry, as relevant mailing list users drop off fairly quickly because people only plan a wedding for a limited time frame.
Up your SEO efforts
Making sure your website is as SEO friendly as possible is really important. Making sure you have it all set up right by a professional web designer with a strong background in SEO is the best way to achieve this. You’ll also want to have an ongoing strategy to target keywords through a blog/your CMS. Direct traffic is a great way to increase your visibility online, too.
Be present on a range of platforms
Not pigeonholing yourself into one or two platforms is the best way to go. If all you have set up to drive traffic or enquiries to your business is a Facebook page and one day it crashes – then where are you left?
Having a diverse range of platforms that you’re present on, know how to use and are making the most of is really important. Having a great website, a couple of social media platforms, your Easy Weddings storefront and some paid per click advertising like Google Ads is a great way to diversify your marketing spend.
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