Don’t Put All Your Eggs in the
Social Media Basket!

Managing an online business presence takes a lot of time. Time that many business owners just don’t have. Many choose to focus on one or two social channels such as Facebook and Instagram to promote their business and interact with customers. But what happens if these social giants go offline and suddenly there’s no way to connect with customers?

On October 4, 2021 this is exactly what happened to Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. These social media platforms were down for 6 hours in the middle of the work day, making it impossible for businesses to connect with prospects and customers. It felt like the world of online business came to a complete stop until service was finally restored.

Facebook issued a statement opens a new window saying…

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

These factors made the problem more difficult to fix which is why the services were offline for so long. This was the worst outage since 2019 when the networks were offline for over 24 hours.

Social media is a great way to build a following for your business, but it shouldn’t be the only way you connect with them. The unfortunate truth is, these platforms can go offline or shut your account down for any reason, at any time. Losing a social media following that you’ve worked so hard to grow can be devastating. The good news, there are ways to protect your following from these outages and deleted accounts, and it all starts with your website.

Your website is the hub of your online presence

Social media is a great place to connect with prospects and customers, after all that’s where they spend most of their time. But it shouldn’t be the only place you connect with them. Bringing the conversation back to your website is an important step in extending your connection with them.

Think of your online presence like a wheel and your business website is the hub. All of your social media profiles, email lists, ads, SEO, etc., are all spokes pointing back to your website. Using these channels to drive traffic to your website is an opportunity to connect with your following outside of the social platforms, and it’s the only place that you own and have control over the experience.

Make your website a destination worth visiting

In today’s busy world, we have very little free time and need to spend it wisely. If a follower is going to take their time to visit your website, you need to make it worth it, not only for them, but to you as the business owner. You need to provide value in appreciation of their time. That value can take many forms from being a source of information, a source of help or even a source of entertainment.

Your business website is more than an online brochure, it’s a digital marketing machine!

It can be used to capture leads, book appointments, handle support, promote your products and services, share your discounts and deals, and so much more. Your marketing machine will provide great value to your visitors and allow you to connect with them in a more meaningful way outside of social media.

Knowing that they can easily book an appointment, get answers to their questions, or find a deal on a product they’ve been looking for, makes your website a worthy destination.

Now imagine having a lead generation tool on your site. A mechanism to capture your visitor’s name and email address in exchange for your offer (not just a newsletter signup), giving you the ability to keep in touch with them should something ever happen to your social accounts.

Blogging is nothing new, businesses have been doing it for years. Writing or creating video content about your products and services; how to use them, tips to get the most from them, industry news, etc., then sharing the content through your social channels is a great way to drive traffic to your website where you have to opportunity to connect with your visitors.

Spending time on social media is important, but as we’ve seen, the following you have can be taken away at anytime. A website at the center of your online presence is a very powerful tool. Use it to connect with your prospects and customers and provide value that makes your business worthy of their time.

One of the trends in website design is the use of video backgrounds on the home page. The concept being, large moving images will draw the viewer’s eye to a call-to-action. But are video backgrounds a good idea?

Many people think that video backgrounds help a website standout in a crowd. The large moving images draw the viewer in to create an engaging experience. And the longer someone stays on your site, the better it looks for SEO. But in reality they are distracting the viewer from the main message and the reason they came to your site in the first place.

When someone visits your website you only have 5 seconds to capture their attention. You don’t want that time spent watching a video that was meant as a design element. You want the visitor to read your message and take action. If they can’t determine what your company is about and what they are supposed to do next within that 5 seconds, you will most likely lose them.

Why You Should Consider Eliminating Video Backgrounds

Even though they may look cool and be part of a design trend, here are a few reasons why you should consider eliminating them from your website.

• Video backgrounds increase loading time for a page
• They distract from the primary message/call-to-action
• Autoplay videos may be blocked by desktop and mobile web browsers
• Videos use more data on mobile devices

Design trends come and go, and in the world of web design those trends move at lightening speed. In reality a website needs to be redesigned yearly to keep up with changing trends and technologies, but this is not possible for most small businesses. Sometimes jumping on these trends can be more harmful to your business in the long run than the benefits gained in the short term.

If you’re not a cutting edge company that needs to keep up with the latest trends, then our recommendation is to consider a more evergreen approach to design. Good clean design will allow businesses to extend their website lifecycle two or three years before a redesign is needed.

Safe web browsing and internet security is more important today than it has ever been. Everyday we hear about another major website being hacked and their service going down, or customer data being compromised. It happens to the best of them, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, they have all experienced these problems, and the sad truth is, it could happen to your website too.

We need to be diligent in protecting our website and data by ensuring the web server software is up-to-date, that your Content Management System and plugin software is up-to-date, that security monitoring is in place, and website backups are running daily. But there is another step we can take to help protect our website and visitors, and that’s using SSL and HTTPS.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and is the standard security technology used to create an encrypted link between a web server and the user’s web browser. Think of this connection like a tunnel between your website and your users. There is only one way in and one way out and all data sent between them is kept private and secure.

To create this secure connection you first need to purchase and install an SSL Certificate on your web server. You will need to answer a few questions about the identity of your company and website and then two cryptographic keys will be generated, a Private Key and a Public Key.

The Public Key is placed into a data file called a Certificate Signing Request (CRS) and is submitted to the Certification Authority that will validate your details and issue the SSL Certificate. Your web server will then match your issued SSL Certificate to your Private Key establishing an encrypted connection to your user’s web browser.

The encrypted connection is made over HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) and will display https in the website address bar along with a closed padlock symbol.

Why do you need SSL?

SSL data encryption secures your website visitor’s connection, and when people see that padlock icon in the web address bar, they feel a little safer and trust visiting and shopping on your site. It also helps to limit your security liability knowing that the connection isn’t being compromised by a hacker trying to capture sensitive data.

Google and other search engines like secure websites. They are recommending you just by displaying your website in their search results. If they know your site is secured by SSL, they will be more likely to rank you higher in the results than your competition who aren’t using SSL.

If you have an e-commerce site, membership site, or are collecting some form of sensitive data, SSL is a must!

In the past to purchase, configure and install an SSL certificate on a website could get pretty expensive. But with the different options available today, it’s never been more affordable to secure your site.

All Launch Engine Websites include a FREE SSL certificate.

Have questions? Contact Mission Control today for a free, no obligation consultation with one of our Launch Specialists.