Don’t build out your entire business on social media!

Peter posted this on December 13, 2020

Something just happened right now

But before I say what happened, I’d tell a short story.

6 years ago we started a Business selling Self Defense and Spy Gadgets (Tasers, Spy Cameras, Stun guns Pepper Spray, Trackers, etc).

I had experience using Facebook Advertising so I put up my first ads there,

The Ads were a hit!

We shipped items to almost every state, shipped items every single day & sometime in June 2016,  decided to invest millions in inventory.

We ramped up Ad spend, spent a lot on shipping Material & then one fine Monday around 11am I noticed no order had been placed, nothing had been shipped.

Decided to investigate the Ad account and written in red all over was their new policy,

They had decided to classify everything we sell as weapons and as such banned our account and stopped all ads with immediate effect!

That was were 95% of sales were coming from, there was a mighty pile of stock waiting in the warehouse to be sold & here was our source of sales, without prior warning booting us out!

I’d to hire offline salespeople quickly, did wholesale deals (discounted rates for resellers buying large quantities), started an SMS campaign (luckily we kept records of everyone who had enquired or placed orders), move ad budget to twitter (not as good results), list on classified sites (jiji, olx etc) etc etc but somehow we sold hundreds of that stock in a matter of months

 

& I learnt a lesson.

Never to build a Business on a platform I have very little say over.

You can build a page, get millions of likes & followers, orders, etc but a social media platform can wake on the wrong side and press the delete button, rendering all your work useless.

 

What made me make this post was,

I logged in to Facebook today to laugh at memes (and maybe have a little more of my usage data stolen).

Few minutes in I was asked to confirm I’m not a robot (duh!), asked to upload my ID, etc etc and after everything, told that because of Covid 19 I won’t be on for a long time.

Fortunately I don’t run ads or anything via my account anymore so couldn’t be bothered.

Once it happened I started imagining, what if I’d built my entire business on Facebook Pages, Facebook Ads etc?

I’d have been shut out from everything for days? Maybe weeks?

That’s what inspired this post

Downloading my information now, 1 less place to kill time.

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