Is This The End Of Facebook? What Marketers Should Know

This week Facebook suffered its longest outage since Tom from MySpace hung up his white t-shirt and ceded the social media throne to Mark Zuckerberg. In what I’m sure was coincidental timing, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp simultaneously went offline the day after a whistleblower’s interview with 60 Minutes (remember that show?) aired. All this happened while congress continues to mull how it could break up Facebook in an effort to stop Finsta.

So with the sharks seemingly circling in on Zuck and attribution modeling looking more like a shot in the dark than a can’t-miss bullseye, is it time for marketers to abandon ship?

Hardly.

Much has been said in our industry around diversification – heck, I’ve advocated for it here on multiple occasions. But an omni-channel marketing strategy still needs an infusion of paid traffic, and when the platform is running properly there’s no beating Facebook’s Ads platform, even with the attribution issues inflicted by Apple. TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are all suitable complements to your paid channel strategy, but there’s a big difference between diversification and diving off the deep end.

In fact, I think B2B and CPG marketing leaders reading this blog post might be in luck come Q4. As the supply chain shortage continues, there will be an unprecedented trickle-down effect as eCommerce retailers scale back ads as their inventory dwindles. This will lead to lower effective CPM rates and an opportunity to “buy low” on Facebook and Instagram Ads not seen since a handful of prominent brands decided to boycott Facebook.

Regardless, whatever channels you’re going to invest in this season will require an investment into great creative. Lower-cost CPM rates don’t matter if you can’t command the attention of your target audience. Pour any spare resources into developing great creative with the help of your agencies, influencers, and customers in order to go from relevant to a revelation on your paid channels this quarter.

As day-traders of attention, plan to double-down and buy low on Facebook, as long as you have something in stock to sell.