Writers and entrepreneurs:

Most of you know that in addition to writing, I also teach social media marketing strategy. This is what you must understand…

On March 13, 2019, Facebook and Instagram (also owned by FB), were down most of the day. Sales, launches, online classes, and anything else hosted on those sites were crushed. Today, we are having a similarly glitchy day across both platforms.

If you are using only these two applications to build your reader/client base, serve your followers, teach classes, disseminate information, or in any way build your business, you need to rethink that strategy. Just as the old farmers said, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

1) You own your web domain and email lists. Those are the most valuable parts of your marketing and communication platform and should always be managed by separate programs. These two parts of your business should always get top priority.

2) You borrow space on all other services for free, and while they are useful, you are at their mercy. The “Big Four” tech firms are Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook.

  • Google is the number one search engine and owns the number two search engine, YouTube. It also owns all the GSuite apps and Blogger.
  • As of last week, Facebook owns Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus Rift, FriendFeed, Asenta, and PhotoGeo.
  • Amazon also owns Alexa, Audible, Goodreads, IMDb, Ring, Twitch, WholeFoods, Zappos, and Woot.
  • Apple owns all the Macintosh products, iServices, FinalCutPro, LogicPro, and GarageBand.
  • Twitter owns Gnip, MagicPony, MoPub, Periscope, TapCommerce, TellApart, and TweetDeck. Yelp and Square are also loosely related through at least one of Twitter’s three primary stock holders.
  • Microsoft owns LinkedIn, in addition to Skype, Bing, Azure, MSOffice, Xbox, OneDrive, and Outlook.

If you want to know more, check out my Pinterest Board related to Social Media.

If you want help rethinking your social media strategy, let me know.