Women Entrepreneurs: How to Plan Now for Another Social Media Marketing Outage

Whether you want to admit it or not, most of us are addicted to social media mostly because it has developed as a free promotional, messaging, marketing, and communication tool for small woman-owned companies who tend to lack funds and staff. If you are like me, you use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn as often as you use Kleenex, and Xerox. Brands whether good for us or not creep and then seep into our normal routine making them hard to break.

We have become so dependent on these business and personal mediums that when an unexpected outage occurs, we think we are the ones to blame. Yesterday, I must have tried 10 or more times to check into my social media accounts blaming the impossibility as my own fault, the wireless in my house, my oldish-new computer, and just having a bad tech day; never did it occur to me there was a massive outage. If that’s not the sign of overdependence and hyper-regularity of a product or service, nothing is.

Many people are asking today, “What did you do yesterday when you didn’t have access to your social media accounts,” my response, “After taking a biking lunch break to destress from it assuming it was my computer’s fault, I thought about what I would do if these marketing tools didn’t exist anymore.” Human nature likes familiarity and busy woman entrepreneurs really do as they strive to complete multiple tasks on a daily basis with less or no staff and limited technology education. We don’t have time to work at a snail’s pace.

It is not that we can’t live without tweeting, posting, or blogging, but for many of us it is the best, cheapest and easiest way to communicate with our friends, customers, and potential clients about our companies, products and services. It is for me at least, and I think I represent many women in business. So today we should at least contemplate ways to substitute these platforms if they get too regulated, start costing money, or go away all together. Do we have a plan for that in our business plan?

Maybe 2022 will be the year of good ole marketing flyers, knocking on doors, face-to-face coffee meetings, old fashion letters, paid print advertising, or big billboards instead of online promotion. Now is the time to think about what you left by the wayside when social media became the major way to appeal to others. Let’s not wait until the next social media blackout to realize we are in the dark and at the hands of multimillion dollar companies.