Invest most fully in marketing tools that can’t be ripped out from under you.
By Roy Harryman
Social media is dominant, with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pushing hard to get your business to advertise.
They promise a great deal. And sometimes they deliver.
But often what they deliver pure chaos. Social Media Examiner is a well-established media brand and had approximately 400,000 followers on its Facebook page (more than 500,000 today). One day they woke up to find their page was gone. Just vanished.
On a much smaller scale, a small-business colleague of mine saw his Facebook business page (with 3,000 hard-won fans) also vanish.
Neither of these events were suspensions or penalties: These business users’ pages just disappeared.
In situations like this, there is no one to call. You can only “chat” with bots that have preprogrammed responses and often lead you in circular reasoning. For example, Facebook and Instagram tutorials on reclaiming a hacked account tell you to hit the “re-send your password” button. But if a hacker has changed your account’s email address, you can’t get the re-set code. It’s a dead end.
The closest you’ll get to human interaction is writing a postal letter to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. You can hope and pray someone will open and read it.
Or you can go on TV three times and make an appeal. Yes, I said that! Another small-business colleague of mine had her Facebook and Instagram business accounts hijacked by someone claiming to be a jihadist. My friend was no slacker on security and had used two-factor authentication to secure her account. Yet it failed.
The hacker was a pro (if you can say that) and harassed and stalked my colleague for months, demanding ransom.
“But the great thing about Facebook and Instagram was that they did … absolutely nothing. ”
The business owner was trapped in bot Hades.
The only thing that remedied the situation was the TV media. She did not one, but three interviews about her plight before someone at Facebook saw a report and told someone else at Facebook about the issue. Then it was fixed nearly instantaneously.
Instagram is legendary for security vulnerabilities. In fact, people sometimes hire hackers to hack the hackers and get their accounts back.
In addition to these horror stories, Facebook’s robot-driven business model makes absurd decisions based on AI scans of content.
On my personal page, I posted a meme of Churchill and Hitler (obviously it was overtly, clearly and unmistakably deriding Hitler). Eight months after I posted this, my account was suspended for violating community standards. This post was the reason. Because my account was tied to multiple business accounts, they were also put into limbo. There was no appeal, no one to call. I was simply toast until the period of suspension was lifted. As a customer, I had spent thousands of dollars on Facebook ads. It didn’t matter.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Social media is rented land. You can’t control it. It’s there one day and gone the next. No matter how good of a steward you are, the landlord can show up one day and kick you to the curb.
“A man feels more of a man in the world if he has a bit of ground that he can call his own. ”
Observations
So what should we do? Give up on social media? No. Instead, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. For one, have a presence on more than one platform. Then if the bots erase you on Facebook, you can still post content on Twitter.
But the greater lesson is to invest most fully in media platforms you can own and manage. A website is the most concrete example of this. The storms of social media will violently rage, but your website can continue to steadily post content, expand its offerings and engage with customers and prospects.
Another “owned” tool is your customer/prospect database. If you diligently and ethically build a permission-based database, you can reach the people who matter most to your business via text, email and postal mail.
Email marketing is part rent, part owned. The email list is yours. But the email marketing tool has its own rules. If you generally follow them, you’ll be in good standing. But sending to rogue lists can get you into trouble and destroy your sender reputation. You can also get marked as spam if you use tools like Gmail and Outlook to try and send to large lists. Don’t do it.
Other owned marketing tools include any physical assets, whether a sign, storefront or vehicle wrap. Make the most of them. Facebook can’t take them away.
Home ownership used to be a nearly universal aspiration of Americans. Today, renting and apartment living have surged in popularity. That’s all good and fine.
But when it comes to your marketing machinery, renting isn’t hip. In fact, if it’s your only hangout, you may become homeless.
Roy Harryman is the principal of Roy Harryman Marketing Communications, a firm that helps small businesses and nonprofits make a big impact on even a small budget. He’s also the veteran of many battles with cavalier and indifferent social media companies who should behave better.