Social media outages hurt small businesses -- so it's important to have a backup plan
The Meta outage that affected Facebook, Messenger and Instagram for a few hours on Tuesday was an inconvenience for most
NEW YORK — To businesses that rely on social media platforms for advertising, client communication or direct sales, Tuesday's Meta platforms outage was more than a communal inconvenience.
Experts say that whenever there's an outage — be it social media or other softwarewe've come to rely on — it’s a reminder that small businesses need to make sure they aren’t reliant on one platform and have contingency plans in place — like an email database — when an outage does occur.
Cheyenne Smith, in Salt Lake City, Utah, founder of Dakota Ridge, an e-commerce company selling children's shoes, relies on Meta's platforms, primarily Instagram, to grow her customer base, via a mix of unpaid Instagram posts and paid ads.
She said she couldn't quantify specifically how many sales she lost during the outage, but anecdotally said when the site went down, sales flowing to her e-commerce site stopped completely. But she says she has no plans to end her reliance on Meta's platforms, because they drive more sales than other social media sites she has tried.
“We are trying other social media channels, we just haven’t been able to crack the code on them just yet, like we have on the Meta platform,” she said. “So it’s kind of, in my opinion, a necessary evil for us.”
Still, experts say it's important to look beyond one site, particularly when it comes to growing a customer database.
“Yesterday was a wakeup call to many, many business owners,” said Ramon Ray, a small business consultant who often speaks publicly about marketing. He advised small business owners to use the outage itself to goad customers into providing their
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