Facebook is more than a social media platform. For many businesses, Facebook is a great marketing tool. The recent Facebook outage might have been just a simple inconvenience for regular users, but businesses managed to lose money during those hours.
Affected businesses
Numerous business owners shared their experience with the Facebook outage. For instance, Jason Wong has a company named Wonghaus Ventures. For him, timing was unfortunate. He decided that a Facebook and Instagram ad campaign would help him promote the restock of his false eyelash line.
Sadly, very few people saw the posts, as the social media networks were down. “Looking at our prior revenue for the past seven or eight days, and looking at what happened today, we can kind of estimate how much money we lost based on our past week’s history,” he says. Wong believes that he lost around $10000 in revenue.
Candy Calderon is another businesswoman affected by the outage. In her case things were even worse, as she needed to advertise a specific event. She had an online training for women entrepreneurs planned and she wanted to use last-minute ads on Instagram, Facebook and Instagram Stories. However, the Facebook ads didn’t even show up on Facebook. More than that, she was charged for the Instagram ads, despite the fact that she does not know for sure whether anyone saw them.
“My main thing is if [Instagram] kept eating my budget while nobody was seeing my ad, thus not enrolling in my class or even at least having awareness of it, there are so many ways in which this is a loss for me, not only monetary,” Calderon explained.
These are only two cases, but numerous other businesses were affected. In the future Facebook needs to be better prepared and be more transparent with the advertisers.
Nora Reynolds is a major in biology and a minor in Biological Basis of Behavior, writing about science in general. She also likes to try new gadgets and sports about the AI new era.
