Facebook as a Backup Web Page

My hosting company fell off the planet for half a working day today. Their own website was down along with all their clients. Not just website but all hosting services such as email.Their phone lines were also out of order!

Arghh. None of my sites or my clents sites and blogs were up and no emails able to get through! I was getting phone calls from clients and couldn’t tell them anything.

Now before I say anything else I will say that the company I use are superb. In the 5+ years that I have been with them, the amount of downtime has been minimal – maybe once or twice so this was very much out of character for them. I won’t say who they are as it’s not relevant for the purpose of this article.

What this scenario did present though was observations, challenges and opportunities as follows

1. Their only method of communication through the early part of the downtime was Twitter.  They responded to @mentions but could have been more proactive by sending one tweet so that anyone viewing their twitter timeline would have seen the situation. They did have a different support page URL but this wasn’t communicated anywhere. They could have tweeted this and they could have changed their twitter profile in a jiffy to show this page link.  Instead they ended up responding to @mentions to them from unsympathetic and unhappy clients when they could have been more proactive. They could have set up a feed from their status update website to their twitter account so that every time an update was recorded it would have been tweeted. This would have built confidence that they were on the ball with resolving the technical fault but also that they had things in place to communicate updates automatically and thus negating the need for un-supportive @mentions.
2. I looked everywhere on the web for their phone number (before I knew it was out of action) but just couldn’t find it.  This was because their search engine rankings only gave top search results for their main website (which I knew was down) and I was on page 5 of google before I gave up. So where did I look? Facebook of course! It seemed like the most intuitive place to look. If I had thought that, how many others would have too? Interesting how times change as it wasn’t my first thought to call directory enquiries.
3. When I got to their facebook page I thought “hurrah, I can find out what’s going on and call these guys” but no such luck. Their page was bare. No phone number, no profile information, no updates for over a year. What a shame!  In the end I had to refer to old invoices I had paid to find a phone number that way. Then, when I tried to phone, their lines were dead so I was back to Social Media for updates via twitter.
4. By that time they had tweeted the address of their Support site with updates and this got me thinking about their clients who were not on Twitter that would have been in a situation with no site to view, no number to call, and no way of knowing where updates would come from.

Some Business Owners feed back to me that they choose not to participate in Social Media especially Facebook because they do not want to invite negative PR.  The view that I take on this is that people are talking about your company anyway, regardless of whether you invite it or not.

Having a platform that is well known to use in a constructive manner is surely better than risking the loss of customers. After all, we all work hard and spend good money to acquire these customers initially to only loose them through lack of care or in this case, communication alone.

So, to summarise, if your site goes down for whatever people there is a very very high chance that a lot of customers would head over to facebook! … Just as I did.  Not all of them will but a lot will.  It seems like a knee-jerk, intuitive action to search for companies on facebook in the absence of a website.

Therefore it makes sense to have a Facebook Business Page and a different email address for people to contact you on. Perhaps when your main site and email hosting is OK you may redirect the email on your facebook profile and pages to your main email. But if things go wrong with your hosting, you can take the divert off as still have a working email address.

This instance brought home to me the importance of having a Facebook Business Page merely as a presence and as a support their main marketing channels.  Even if having a Facebook Page is not perceived as appropriate or relevant as a sales and marketing tool, it really would benefit some businesses to have this as a contingency space.

What are your thoughts?

Facebook, General, Marketing Consultants, Social Media, Twitter