How Digital Marketers Respond When Social Media Crashes
Hi there! I don’t think I’ve ever formally introduced myself, but my name is Patricia and I’m the Digital Content Creator at Arnold Street Media. I’ve written quite a few blogs over the past several months on all things digital marketing related, but today I’ve decided it’s time to get a little more personal and talk about an issue that has been plaguing digital marketers everywhere – social media sites crashing.
Instagram and Facebook went down for an entire day last Wednesday, and the hashtags #instagramdown and #facebookdown could be seen all over social. It became a big ordeal for platform users and an even bigger ordeal for me.
Social media is not a regular 9-5 job – it’s a 24 hour, all-immersive, and never-ending experience. Also, the last thing I want is to disappoint one of our clients.
Here are the six phases I (and many other digital marketers) go through when social media stops working:
1. Confusion
When a big technological glitch happens, I respond just as the rest of society does – I’m utterly confused as to what is happening. That’s right, just because you’re in digital marketing doesn’t mean you are in the know on all things going on behind the scenes at Facebook’s headquarters. The loading sign that was in place of all our clients’ photos that were supposed to go out that day had me completely perplexed.
2. Hope
The next phase I went through when social crashed was one of hope. I was optimistic that Facebook and Instagram would be restored back to normal in less than an hour’s time. How could these social giants just leave their platforms down for an entire day? Surely their employees would be working tirelessly to restore all our posts back to their intended form. We are in the digital age after all!
3. Denial
As we all know by now, Facebook and Instagram were not back to normal within an hour’s time on Wednesday, July 3rd, which led me to my next phase – denial. There’s no way this could be happening, we worked too hard on our posts for them not to be seen by the public. This just simply isn’t fair.
4. Chaos
My fourth phase took place when my boss and coworkers realized that social media had crashed, and it was chaos. I was working from home this particular Wednesday and I started getting a barrage of messages asking if I could see the photos. Sadly, my answer to that question was “no”.
5. Acceptance
It was now time to come to grips with what was happening and accept it for what it was, but first I needed to do a bit of research. I typed “Instagram not working” into the Google search engine and was immediately presented with several articles about the social platform being down. One Narcity article confirmed my worst fears – Instagram and Facebook were down worldwide and the Internet was freaking out.
6. Try, try, and try again
As a digital marketer, there’s no such thing as giving up on a scheduled post, so that left me with one option – to try, try, and try again. I refreshed my feed periodically throughout the remainder of the day and prayed to the digital gods that the images would show up eventually. By the next day, I could see all our posts and their pictures, but engagement was heavily impacted by the crash. Thanks a lot, Facebook!
As social networks continue to grow it’s more than likely that these crashes will occur again, and as digital marketers, all we can do is deal with it. The next time Facebook and Instagram crash during a workday, I’ll just try to keep calm and connect on.
