What would you do if the most important traffic source for your business went down tomorrow?
That was the thought on my morning walk the day Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all went dark at once and caused chaos for businesses everywhere. Whole companies that had built their customer contact on those platforms suddenly had no way to reach anyone.
One traffic source is a single point of failure
I was watching Shark Tank recently where a business was spending three million dollars a year on Facebook ads. Plenty of businesses spend that and more. But what happens if that is your main traffic source and it goes down for a day, a week, or the algorithm quietly changes and your reach halves overnight?
Nine times out of ten, when someone comes to us they ask for "a Facebook strategy" or "an Instagram strategy". Those platforms are important, and for many businesses they are crushing it. But each one is only a piece of the puzzle, and you do not control any of them.
Build on ground you own
Your organic reach on Facebook is far lower than your organic reach on a well-optimised website. That is where it should start. Social platforms rise, fall and change the rules whenever they like. Your website and your email list are the two things you actually own.
So if you have an ecommerce store with no real email marketing in place, you are leaving revenue on the table and putting the business at risk. If you are ignoring a slow website that is quietly costing you search rankings, you are losing out there too.
Take a holistic approach
The point is not to drop social. It is to make sure it is one channel among several, not the only one holding the business up. When you take a holistic approach, your website, your SEO, your email list and your Google reviews all become a backup for each other. If one source wobbles, the others keep you trading.
So have a think today. If you rely on one source and it stops, what happens? And are you building the foundations, the systems and the processes that let you grow, get more visible and win more business, whatever any single platform decides to do next?