For most of us, a social media outage is a minor inconvenience, but for a freelance marketing professional like Brooke Willis and the businesses she serves, it’s a more serious concern.
Willis – who also owns her own business called Studio Social, provides marketing services and social media support for various local businesses, including K’s Koncepts, Apricot Lane Boutique, and FX Spine & Performance Center. When both Facebook and Instagram shut down for more than six hours on Monday, Oct. 4, she couldn’t add posts for her clients on those sites until they came back up at about 6:30 p.m. But some of her clients use other social media sites, such as LinkedIn and Pinterest, so she could still create posts on those sites. “I stayed busy, but when Facebook and Instagram came back up, I had a list of posts that needed to be put on there,” says Willis. “I just kept checking in to see if they were back up.”
While the outage affected her job, she states it was more detrimental to her retail clients. “They probably lost out on sales because they use social media for selling,” adds Willis.