Don’t rely on Facebook as your primary communication channel

I volunteer for an event called the Kansas Author Dinner. The event was Thursday, February 24. The Kansas Author Dinner Facebook page has a small, yet loyal following (31 people like the page).

The Facebook page went down on Friday, February 18, less than a week before the event.  When you visited the page as an “unliker” you see this:

As the administrator of this page, I had been posting content (status updates, links and pictures) for a good nine months. This is the page I saw when I logged in as the administrator:

This is how it looked before (except with 31 people who like the page, instead of zero):

A few hours later, the page had been removed from my list of admin pages, and was unsearchable in Facebook.

I posted a message on Facebook’s Help Center, but wasn’t optimistic about getting any answers. Have you ever seen the bucket full of issues, bugs and problems already on the Help Center?

The good news is that our website had all the information about the Kansas Author Dinner. You can read about the authors, visit their pages and buy tickets to the event.

About 24 hours later, the page magically re-appeared as if nothing had happened.

This was not detrimental to our event. Ticket sales were not affected. In fact, we sold more tickets this year than we ever have before.

But what if this was our only communication to our audience? What if this was the only site on the web where people could get information?

Your organization’s website should always be the hub of your online presence. You have control of your website…the way it looks, what content is featured, etc. And if your site goes down, you know who to call to get it back up and running, right?  Unlike my insignificant question that was probably lost in a sea of other unanswered questions.