What if Facebook crash today?

Aight, so Instagram went down for some hours some times back and plenty people ran to Twitter to post and comment on #Instagramdown. Well, this is not the first, second and may not be the last time that #Instagramdown will happen and that should tell businesses marketing their brands and products online something.

Sometimes, when I tell clients that they need to build their own online platform(s) without necessarily relying heavily on third-party platforms like Facebook, Twitter and IG, they smug and will be like; why do I need to do that when I can easily list my products and services on Instagram and Facebook?

Well, I normally tell them that 20 years ago, there were no Facebook and Instagram. The king of the game then was Myspace, Friendster, Yahoo messenger and lots of other social networking websites.

Ten years later, Friendster and Yahoo messenger has been shut down and they no longer exist.

While I’m not preaching doom and gloom for Facebook and Instagram, it is imperative that you don’t put all your marketing efforts on these platforms. Who knows what will happen in the next 5 – 10 years?

However, when you build your own online presence, you have your destiny in your own hands. You get to control, personalize, tweak, generate your own customer data and generally control your own marketing platform without any risk of losing your customers when one or more of these social platforms shut down.

Digital is definitely the future of marketing and media distribution. However, things change very fast and the best way to adapt is to build your own online platform where you store and generate marketing data instead of relying heavily on third-party platforms that gives you little or no control over their sustainability.