Have you got an Instagram back-up plan?

On Monday 31st October Instagram suffered a major glitch. One that resulted in many accounts being suspended and then due to the sheer numbers of suspended accounts, others saw a rapid drop in follower numbers.

For a couple of stressful hours, many businesses were left wondering what to do next and fortunately the glitch was short lived and by Monday evening all service was back to normal.

However, this glitch highlighted something we all need to think about if we’re using Instagram to talk to customers and grow communities and build customer relationships.

My job is teach people how to us Instagram for their business but I’m also very aware that I do not own my Instagram platform so I wanted to share with you the things I do to protect my business and ensure that in situations like the Halloween glitch that I can still contact and connect with my audience.

Build and email list

Starting an email list and regularly sending out emails and newsletters to your list is probably one of the very best ways to protect your business. Because you own your email list. And it doesn’t matter if all the social media platforms go down, you’ll still be able to contact the people on your email list.

I send out an email newsletter every 2 weeks ( it used to be every week but I now find posting bi-weekly means a higher level of engagement).

Once you set up your email list, don’t forget to encourage people to sign up to it. Talk about it on Instagram, share the sign-up link in your Stories. There are lots of email providers - I use Mailchimp but do some research a find a platform that works for you.

Your website

Don’t forget how important your website is for your business.

Make sure you keep all the information on your website up to date. Ensure that it’s easy to navigate and that people can easily find your products and services and can purchase them.

Do all the links work correctly? Do you regularly checks your analytics to see if you are driving traffic to the pages you want people to see? I have a Squarespace website and I find their traffic analytics so useful.

And make sure people can easily get in touch with you on your website.

Write a blog

Writing a blog is great for your business in a number of ways. Firstly it can be great for SEO (search engine optimisation) especially if you’re managing to include keywords into your blogs.

When you add a blog to your website it’s signalling to Google that your website is live and active so it can help with your ranking.

And it’s also a great way for you to add more value to your community and demonstrate your expertise too. There’s only so much you can talk about on an Instagram post or a Reel, so writing blog means you can expand of all those musings.

Up until a few weeks ago I was averaging around one blog a year but I decided to get back to publishing regular short bite sized blogs and so far I seem to be sticking to it.

Blogs are also great for discoverability because other people can share them easily. Also writing blogs for other people can be a great way to increase your discoverability too.

Could LinkedIn or Pinterest work for you?

Now I spend a lot of time on Instagram and this is where I publish pretty much all of my content but I do find LinkedIn is a good platform for reaching my target audience. Particularly when other people share my LinkedIn posts.

Could you spend some time on the other social platforms where you know your people are too?

LinkedIn is definitely having a moment right now - lots of people are reporting great results from spending time on there and regularly posting content to LinkedIn. If you’re a service business it’s definitely worth giving LinkedIn a go.

If you’re a product business are you also on Pinterest? Pinterest is a search engine which can really drive traffic to your website so again a platform to consider if you want to find new ways to increase discoverability.

This of course is not an exhaustive list - these are just some of the things I’m dong to make sure there are other ways that people can contact me and I can connect with my customers if Instagram goes down.

Did the Instagram glitch on Halloween affect your account? Do you feel like there are other ways you could protect your business? Please do share in the comments