About a week ago, one of my best friends texted me around 7:00 in the morning.
“Hey, can you log into Facebook? I’m locked out.”
So I opened my Facebook app to check.
Sure enough, I was locked out too.
As the morning went on, more and more people started asking the same question. It quickly became clear that Facebook was experiencing an outage. For a brief period of time, users around the world couldn’t access their accounts.
And while a lot of people were frustrated, I noticed something else.
Many business owners were panicking.
What if they needed to make an announcement that day?
What if they had a sale scheduled?
What if Facebook was their only way to reach customers?
As it happened, that same day I was planning to announce eight new bulls for sale from our ranch.
But I wasn’t worried at all.
Not even a little.
The reason is simple: Facebook isn’t the foundation of our marketing strategy.
It’s just one piece of it.
Long before social media existed, businesses built customer relationships through assets they actually owned. Today, those assets are still the most valuable tools you can have:
- Your website
- Your email list
That morning, I already had a plan.
The bulls were going to be posted on our website.
An email was going to be sent to our subscriber list.
Sales would start happening.
Customers were still going to see the cattle.
People would start coming to the ranch to see the bulls.
And business was going to move forward whether Facebook was working or not.
That’s the difference between renting your audience and owning your audience.
When you build your business entirely on social media, you’re essentially renting space on someone else’s platform. You don’t control the rules. You don’t control the algorithm. And you certainly don’t control outages.
At any moment, a platform can change.
An account can be restricted.
A post can reach only a fraction of your followers.
Or the entire platform can go offline.
When that happens, what do you have left?
That’s why we encourage every business owner to invest in a website first.
Your website is your digital home base. It’s the one place online that you truly own and control. It works whether Facebook is up, down, trending, or forgotten.
From there, the next step is building an email list.
An email list allows you to communicate directly with customers whenever you choose. No algorithms. No boosting posts. No hoping your followers happen to see your content.
Just direct communication with people who have already raised their hand and said, “Yes, I want to hear from you.”
Social media is still incredibly valuable. We use it every day.
But it should be a tool, not the entire strategy.
The ideal marketing combination is:
A professional website + a strong email list + social media.
When those three pieces work together, you’re no longer dependent on any one platform.
And the next time Facebook goes down?
You’ll probably be just as calm as I was.