I have some thoughts about the Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp outage this week, and it may not be what you think.
Did you notice it was down? Were you stressed? Did you not even hear about this? If you were't aware basically Facebook Instagram and WhatsApp were completely offline for six hours.
Six hours doesn’t sound like much I hear you say, but for some businesses who rely heavily on Facebook for communicating with their community, for selling products or promoting their services, boy was that a stressful time!
Firstly on the positive, I actually liked not being able to check my social media for a little while – it was a breath of fresh air! Some lessons here to try and spend less time online me thinks...
But secondly, wow – it just goes to show that despite social media being a very effective tool for growing your business, we still need to be focused on getting people off your socials and onto our website and email lists. Sure it's not going to go down every day, but to be at the mercy of such a big powerhouse if they decide to change their algorithms or strategies… could be risky.
I often tell my clients to absolutely include social media in their growth plans, but not to solely rely on it. That we need to be creating ways to bring people back to the platforms we own and can be in control of, through a combination of call to actions, lead magnets and read through strategies. What do I mean by this? Here are some examples..
Posting properties to lease or sharing results? Entice people to sign up with you to be the “fist to know” next time, get them to either DM you their contact details so you can add them to your tenant database, or have a prospect sign up page on your website and direct people there. Ideally integrate your tenant database such as Inspect Real Estate with your website.
Got a handy checklist for landlords? Promote it on your socials for sure, but ask for an email to send it to them and get that email address into your CRM or database. There are ways to automate landing pages and forms to be able to auto send these aswell.
Written a great article or blog? Ask for people to click through to read the whole article, get them to your website, and then hit them with a pop up or form to ask them if they want to be notified of new blogs like this this in their inbox!
Once you have people (your prospective clients) in your own database it's much easier to get your marketing and offers seen too..
There are many more strategies and tools you can use and I do offer a service called "90 min Online Footprint Audit and Lead Generation Plan" where I review your existing online footprint and help you create actionable steps to not only improve your digital footprint but also help to use this to drive actual leads into your business. Usually this is $495+gst but if you write back to this email or book here I'll do this for a special price of just $295+gst for you.
Otherwise please reach out if I can help with any other challenges right now, but just wanted to use this challenge this week as a lesson and share a few ideas on how to keep moving people from your socials onto your owned platforms so you can use your contacts and community how you see fit.
