I pump my fists every time Facebook, Instagram, and/or WhatsApp go down — which seems to be often these days.

When I first wrote about Facebook going down back in 2019 for Entrepreneur magazine, it felt like a blip on the radar. It was one of those unfortunate doomsday situations, like when Amazon Web Services goes down, or when Shake Shack runs out of ShackSauce: Rare… apocalyptic, even… but possible.

Yet these outages are becoming increasingly common. And the timing could not have been worse for Zuck: Whistleblower bombshell reports in The Wall Street Journal already have spun up quite the PR crisis for the tech behemoth.

I’m celebrating. And it’s not because I harbor ill will towards others.

It’s because I’m over here in my little slice of the internet, week in and week out, yelling about how creators and entrepreneurs need an email list. And every week, people ignore me.

People choose social media over email to gather their audience because social media is easier than email.

• It’s easier to create content that is flashy and exciting.
• It’s easier to find and/or research your target market.
• It’s easier to feel like you’re making progress.

To be blunt:

• It’s easier to half-ass it on social media.

For years, social media has been considered an acceptable or even superior alternative to email for marketing purposes. …until moments like this. My fellow email enthusiasts and I are smirking right now.

If you were planning today to sell in your Facebook group or slide into prospects’ DMs on Messenger or post another Reel on Instagram that’s distracting you from actually growing your business… that‘s not an option today.

Online business owners and entrepreneurs who built their followings on and only on social media are stuck right now.

You Don’t Need To Abandon Social Media, But…

I would recommend you leverage social media as a way to get readers off of those platforms and onto your email list.

When you have an email list, none of this stuff happens, because you have far more control over when and how you reach your readers.

Building an audience on and only on social media is really risky.

Sure, you have sexy follower counts. But is that getting you paid?

No? Oh… okay.

That’s actually one of the problems I see happening all over the place in the online entrepreneurship community: People would rather be popular than paid.

So they prioritize popularity, and then they wonder why they can’t convert their followers into customers when all they did was write productivity listicles for the last two years.

As I like to say to my clients: I don’t want the fame, I just want the money.

If that’s also your flavor, join me. Here’s a free report of mine you can download covering six important insights on why email kicks ass — especially in 2021. ⬆️

I send my list other freebies and treats throughout the year.

Otherwise, grab a snack and please join me in celebrating the Facebook dumpster fire we have in front of us today.

• Facebook is down, along with Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus VR (The Verge)
• Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp go DOWN worldwide for three hours and counting in catastrophic outage after server issue causes them to ‘disappear’ from the internet (Daily Mail)
• Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram suffer worldwide outage (Associated Press)
• Facebook’s very, very bad day: Services go down as stock plunges in wake of whistleblower revelations (MarketWatch)
• Facebook is suffering its worst outage since 2008 (CNBC)

(Some context on that last one: In 2008, Facebook didn’t even have the like button yet.)

Hope your Monday is awesome.

Unless you work for Facebook — y’all are probably not reading this article at the moment, and it’s safe to assume your Monday is down for the count.

Thanks for reading. 🙏🏼

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