Being Digitally Anti-Fragile Part 1
Facebook going down for hours reveals the dangers of relying on just one platform. Now is the best time to own your own platform.
On Monday 5th September, 2021 millions of people's livelihoods turned to dust. Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp all went down. To explain it in layman's term, the record of Facebook's address disappeared from the internet. To give you an idea of the scale of this debacle, in 2020 businesses generated an estimated $400 Billion in revenue. That is over a billion dollars per day.
And that is only the formal number. There may be millions of people running informal commercial activity through these platforms. It is your neighbors' niece flipping vintage clothes via Instagram, or your cousin using Messenger to cold contact potential customers for his consulting business. They lost a whole day of business.
If you have a business or are an influencer, this is the best time to reassess your relationship with Big Tech platforms. It is time to invest in your own platforms. In these posts I will explain how to create, run, and maintain a anti-fragile digital presence.
Non-competition
I am not suggesting that you create a competing Social Network app/site. I am not even asking you to quit Facebook's properties, or any other social media. I am asking you to turn your business's digital presence into your own platform.
There are three aspects to having your own platform:
Diversify your presence.
Own your audience.
Own your presence.
This part will focus on the Diversifying your online presence to spread out the risk.
Diversify your presence
Your preferred social platform is based on your target consumer or audience niche. It would seem folly to waste time on Facebook if your primary audience is on Youtube. Who watches videos on Facebook anyway? About 500 Million people.
I will let you in on a secret; you do not know your audience as well as you think. Having your presence across many platforms will give you more insight into your audiences. It may also introduce your brand to new audiences.
Spread your presence on every platform you know.
There are a lot of tools that can automate this flow. Like SocialPilot, Buffer, and HootSuite that can help you with automating this flow. Spreading out your risk will fortify you against unseen events like egregious policy enforcement or rare infrastructure failure like the Facebook outage. Facebook itself agrees with this approach, as they used Twitter to keep users updated about their outage.
This is part 1 of a 3-part series on creating an anti-fragile digital presence. Part 2 and 3 are coming soon. MakThis allows ecommerce businesses expand their platform, by turning their websites into fast, performant apps for iPhone and Android. If you have store that uses Shopify or BigCommerce, you can get on the waitlist here.
Thank you
Mudassir Chapra