How Monday’s Facebook Outage Affects Online Advertisers
If you’re a person who uses Facebook for keeping in touch with your distant uncles and seeing pictures of your high school sweetheart’s dinner, then maybe their company-wide outage on Monday might not have been all that impactful for you. For the millions of small businesses who rely on Facebook for their livelihoods, on the other hand, it was a different story. Monday’s outage left many brands not only unable to access their accounts they do business with, but not even able to log in and check on them. API clients who don’t even log onto the Facebook website were left in the dark on their sales and performance data for nearly an entire work day, made even worse when it finally came back and they realized that the entire day had been a complete loss. The stories of those affected are tough to read, but paint a vivid picture of the worst case scenario come true.
We’ve warned against an over-reliance on Facebook among SMBs for a long time, and Monday’s outage only helps prove out the case against them as a primary source of online marketing. Not to mention their now seemingly quarterly congressional hearings over, shall we say, less than ethical targeting practices, the list goes on.
By placing all of your marketing eggs in the Facebook basket, you are now entirely at the whims of their famously opaque internal machinations. Sometimes that appears in the form of millions of dormant and duplicate accounts being included in your addressable audience, or their intentionally allowing bad actors to use suspicious money to spread misinformation, or now goes down without warning for nearly entire working days leaving millions in the lurch. These are all small pieces of a larger picture of Facebook as a company that uses SMBs as pawns to enrich themselves and doesn’t give them the respect, transparency, and reliability they deserve.
Make no mistake, the companies who bear the brunt of this are the SMBs and small online DTC brands. Larger companies and corporations have marketing departments with diversified operations spanning from social buys to programmatic ads to traditional print, tv and radio and beyond. One day without Facebook for Coca Cola might not even register in their sales figures, the same is likely not the case for your brand.
The solution we are proposing is not to drop Facebook entirely, we know better than that. Facebook provides millions of brands with a simple and largely effective way to connect with highly engaged consumers. If it didn’t work, nobody would be relying on them. Still, by making them your only source of online traffic you leave yourself open to being taken advantage of whenever it is advantageous to them to do so. This can be prevented by simply diversifying your marketing. FieldTest’s digital ad platform allows you the same level of simplicity and effectiveness as Facebook, but with full data transparency, no artificially inflated metrics and the added benefit of an audience that is nearly 2x larger than the walled gardens of social media. We also offer exciting awareness marketing products such as CTV and Newsletter marketing so you know that if one avenue for revenue fails due to outage, or police investigation, congressional inquiry (these are really starting to add up), you have plenty of others to fall back on until the dust settles.
Get in touch to find out how FieldTest can help you set up a diverse and effective marketing operation for your brand all from your laptop.