#FacebookDown: A wake-up call for businesses to go multi-channel

At Optily, we’ve been huge fans of the multi-channel approach for years. After all, each channel offers something unique for each stage of the sales funnel. While it’s great to diversify to maximize returns, if yesterday’s Facebook outage showed us anything, it’s that you really shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket as an advertiser.

The problem with single-channel advertising

While regular users have SMS, Twitter, and other messaging mediums to fall back on, many eCommerce businesses solely use Facebook and Instagram for marketing and communication. When your only channel goes down for nearly half the day, it’s not great for your bottom line.

If Facebook lost an estimated $60 million in ad revenue, imagine how much was lost in sales that those ads would have generated across its platforms?

*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible

— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021

When it comes to channels beyond your own website and curated mailing list, you don’t have much control over them. What you can control is your own strategy. 

The benefits of multi-channel advertising

Next time #FacebookDown is trending, you should be prepared with some ads running on TikTok, YouTube, or Twitter that you can immediately put more budget into. You don’t have to start off big, but you do want to be ready to pivot at a moment’s notice.

Big brands were on it this time around:

hi what can i get u

— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) October 4, 2021

So take a note from McDonald’s and get your feet wet before it’s too late.

This isn’t the first time Facebook’s had a global outage and the next time might be during peak season. Imagine a 6-hour outage on Cyber Monday?!

Optimize your multi-channel ads

If you’re already running ads on Facebook and Google, make sure they’re as optimized as possible. Try Optily’s software free for 14-days and get your ad budgets split for the most impact across all your campaigns, instantly.