By Cree Jones
The social media power players — Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — have been having their fair share of outages recently. Just a few weeks ago, Instagram was down for over 24 hours for some users, causing quite a bit of panic in the social media marketing community.
Technology isn’t perfect and with the ever-changing platform updates, outages are inevitable. It’s dangerous to put all of your eggs in one basket, so to speak. This is why we’ve always stressed the importance of having a marketing and communications strategy that includes a diverse mix of channels and outlets.
So what does that mean exactly?
Each and every brand is different, so we can’t speak for everyone, but being active on multiple social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc. is a good start. If Facebook and Instagram go down, you can still rely on the other channels to connect with your community.
We want to stress the importance of *being active* though. If you plan on utilizing multiple social media channels for your business or brand, you’ll need to have a strategy around each specific channel. All too often, we see brands making the mistake of blasting the same social media post from Instagram to all of their channels, rather than tailoring the content specifically to each channel. You can identify what type of content performs well with your audience by reviewing the analytics or using a third-party reporting platform such as SproutSocial or Hootsuite.
In addition to social media, we recommend having a consistent email marketing campaign schedule, even if it’s as little as a bi-weekly email newsletter. Publishing timely and engaging long-form content in the form of blog posts, whitepapers, tip sheets, etc. is also a good way to offer value to your audience and boost your website’s SEO. Lastly, being experts in the public relations industry, we know what the impact of a solid PR campaign can do to spread the word about your brand or organization.
We know the thought of developing a diverse marketing and communications strategy can seem like a lot of work. That’s where we come in! Contact us if you’re ready to get started and we’re happy to jump in and start planning: info@olivecreativestrategies.com.