Don’t put all your online eggs in one basket

A story popped up this week that made me think hard about why it is important not to put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to online marketing.

An American-based Facebook fan page owner saw his page and its 47,000 fans disappear overnight. The page, called The Official Real Estate Referral Group, was started over two years ago and was unilaterally removed due to copyright issue surrounding its URL.

While this is an extreme example of how powerless individuals can be when dealing with faceless (excuse the pun) social networks, it is symptomatic of the problems Facebook page owners and developers for the platform come across all the time. Features disappear, functionality is lost and those who make a living out of Facebook are left looking stupid and powerless.

I myself struggled with a bug last week which originated over a month ago and has yet to be fixed. In this instance i’ve found a work around, but the fact that no one at the social network has even deemed it important enough to respond to is part of a worrying trend. A trend that was typified by the temporary disappearance of custom landing tabs for Facebook pages that didn’t spend big on advertising or have hundreds of thousands of fans.

Social marketers are increasingly working in a proprietary environment in which we relinquish some control. As users increasingly experience the internet through social networks, we are increasingly dependent on the platforms we use being stable and reliable. Unfortunately while Twitter continues to break (fail whale anyone?) and Facebook moves the goal posts, that is simply not the case.

So do social networks have a vindictive streak, do they enjoy making those who use them for business struggle? The obvious answer is no, but I would argue that while they benevolently believe they know what is best for users, they can (perhaps unwittingly) have a strongly negative impact.

I think the lesson in all of this is that you shouldn’t rely on one platform or channel too much. However successful your Facebook page or Twitter profile is, be prepared to accept indiscriminate changes to the platform and spasmodic outages. And more importantly, don’t expect an immediate answer to your complaints or messages, in fact, expect to be largely on your own.

But despite my gloomy outlook increased integration of different social networking platforms, and their spread into the wider online ecosystem (e.g. Facebook’s open graph protocol) has improved matters by allowing you to communicate through more than one channel simultaneously.

While things are becoming more linked up, i’d say the old adage involving eggs and baskets still holds true online.

Photo credit: Jronaldlee