One Basket is Not Enough
Building Your Business Online
A very good friend started her baking business by doing small projects for friends and family. When it came time to grow her business, she decided to stand up her own Facebook page.
She did not realize the risk.
Facebook is a great platform for small businesses. It is relatively easy to stand up a business page on Facebook, and making updates takes just a bit of time and creativity. You can even receive orders and communicate with your customers directly via Facebook.
She put together a successful page with lots of pictures of her baked goods and testimonials from customers. Before long, she had a thriving business that was generating a good stream of income for her.
Then, a fraudulent report flagged her page, and Facebook shut down her personal and business page. It was down for THREE WEEKS before she was able to get anything restored.
Needless to say, her business, her customers, her photos – everything was unreachable because she kept it all in one place – Facebook.
The moral of the story is, do not put all your business eggs in one basket. It is like the old days if all your files are in one cabinet, and the cabinet catches fire, you can lose everything.
When putting together your small business, redundancy is very important. Make sure you have multiple points to sell and connect to customers. Also make sure your business information is kept safe and is backed up regularly.
Some tips to help keep your small business digitally safe include:
- Set up a scheduled backup system. Do not count on just OneDrive or Google Drive. Instead use a reliable, encrypted backup software solution such as the Click IT Backup solution.
- Keep customer contact information in more than one secured location. This can include your CRM software (Hubspot, Constant Contact, etc.) but you should periodically export the data into an excel spreadsheet and save it for reference. Believe it or not, printing a hard copy and storing in a secured place is not a bad idea in the event of a power outage!
- Use more than one digital platform to sell. Facebook and Instagram are great, but you should also leverage other platforms that are little or no cost. These can include Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Etsy, NextDoor, Yelp, and of course Google.
- Have a business website. No matter what social media platform, having a business website lets you have more control and gives you an easy spot to reference for all of your business interactions.
If you need assistance in managing your digital business, Click IT of Marietta can help you! We can build a small business website for as little as $50 a month! We also have digital marketing services to help you with your social media management.
Do not put everything in one basket – be sure to spread your business across multiple platforms and keep your data secured!