Over the weekend millions of men and women were in an uproar when they noticed that their beloved Fashion Bomb Daily, the web’s number one destination for multicultural fashion had seemingly disappeared from it’s most lucrative platform, Instagram. With over 2.4 million followers many followers who tune into the site daily for fashion inspiration were left wondering what happened to Fashion Bomb Daily? Did they block me? Are they rebranding? There were so many questions and not many answers were coming in from either Fashion Bomb Daily’s CEO, Claire Summers or Instagram until earlier this week when Claire decided to release a statement:
This past week, three of our Instagram accounts, @FashionBombMen @FashionBombKids, and @FashionBombDaily disappeared. They were shut down abruptly and without explanation, on a week when we were on schedule to reach our highest traffic this year thanks to our Met Gala coverage and our exclusive with Blac Chyna. We were killing it. Then we got taken down.
We have a few calls and emails out to Instagram, but in the meantime, we still have the site, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter! We’ll be pouring more energy into those (let’s be honest, they’ve been neglected as of late), so keep it locked here, and visit Facebook.com/thefashionbomb for all the updates that would have been on IG.
We are strong, we will survive, and we will not lose.
Smootches!
We’re definitely sending positive vibes out to Claire as this has got to be a challenging time for her business; however, this latest stunt by Instagrams would be a reminder to all men and women who are freelancers, self employed and business owners to ALWAYS own your content and use social media only as a tool and not a vehicle and here’s why:
If Your Social Media Shuts Down You Lose Direct Contact With Your Followers
Having millions of followers is great but if you don’t know who they are, have their numbers or their email addresses what happens if your social media is shut down like Fashion Bomb Daily’s? What if Instagram or Twitter decides to start charing and suddenly you can’t afford it? Relying solely on social media as the only way you can connect with your audience is not only risky but could be detrimental to your business.
All traffic comes to you
When you use another platform to host your content – whether it’s a publishing platform hosted by a brand like LinkedIn or Medium or a social network like Facebook – those platforms are getting the majority of your traffic. Use alternative platforms to share links to your content. All activity should drive traffic back to your platform.
Better search engine visibility
As a business owner and freelancer search engine visibility is critical. Yes, those other platforms do have the potential to send you a lot of traffic, which is why they’re a great secondary platform but imagine if all those followers you have on Instagram actually came to your site as well. Not only would your visibility increase so would your rankings and potentially your sales.
You Can Easily Monetize Your Own Platform
While social media can be monetizeable it also comes with alot more headache. You have to have a certain amount of followers, likes, comments and more to even be considered for monetizable opportunities. On top of that pressure you also have to compete with the millions and I do mean millions of other social media influencers on the web for these opportunities.
The moral of the story? DON’T RELY ON SOCIAL MEDIA TO BUILD YOUR BUSINESS.