Facebook/Instagram Go Dark

Even those that casually read FTVLive, know that I am not a fan of Facebook.

Many TV stations run contests and spend money to try and get followers on the platform, that they neither own, not have control over.

FTVLive has often pointed out that if stations put as much time and effort into their own websites as they do their social media, they might find that there really isn’t a need for Facebook at all.

Also, not a single station manager has shown me proof that when their main anchor posts a picture of her new dress on Facebook, it leads to higher ratings in the newscasts.

Yesterday, for hours, Facebook went down and I will be interested to see if that had any impact on local news ratings. I’m going to guess that it did not.

Facebook owned Instagram was also down for hours, and that meant TV anchors could not post their dance videos or their outfit of the day. My god….the horror!

FTVLive has been around more than 20 years now and for most of that time, we have ignored social media. We do post links to Twitter, as it is such a simple process. Outside the links, we almost never post much else.

We don’t post what we are eating for lunch, our outfit of the day, or some selfie of us standing at a crime scene.

Guess what? Even 20+ years later, FTVLive’s traffic continues to grow. We focus on the website we own and not on social media that we have little control over.

87% of the traffic that comes to FTVLive.com is direct traffic. In other words, the people coming to this website are doing so by typing FTVLive.com into their browser.

Relying on Facebook and other social media to drive your traffic is not the wise way of doing things. Build your station’s website to be a destination and don’t rely on social to drive your traffic.

As for Facebook being down yesterday?

Wasn’t it enjoyable NOT reading about your cousin Bob is not getting the vaccine, because Joe Biden is trying to control us and take away his gun and the vaccine is just part of that process?

I don’t know about you, but I enjoyed the outage and not reading the nonsense.

As for me, I have marked myself safe: