What to Do When Instagram Goes Down (And Why You Should Care)
What to Do When Instagram Goes Down (And Why You Should Care)
Instagram and Facebook went down for almost an entire day one time.
And for a lot of balloon business owners, so did their business.
If you made no sales that day because you run everything through DMs and Messenger... this post is for you. But honestly, even if you were fine, there are probably a few things here worth paying attention to.
The Actual Problem
There's a difference between using Instagram as a marketing tool and using it as your entire business infrastructure. A lot of decorators (good ones, with real clients and real revenue) are doing the latter without realizing it.
No website. No email list. No CRM. Just a profile, a DM inbox and a whole lot of trust in a platform that has no customer service line and doesn't know you exist.
My friend Lily put it perfectly when she texted me that day: don't put all your eggs in one basket. Because the scarier version of "Instagram went down for a day" is "someone hacked my account and I can never get back in." That happens. I've seen people lose their profiles entirely.
So here's what I'd recommend having in place.
1. Get a Website
I know. I keep saying this. But I saw someone in a Facebook group that day genuinely asking whether having a website is worth it... while Instagram was down... and I had to take a breath.
Your website doesn't need to be fancy. It just needs to exist, and it needs to be somewhere you own and control. Instagram can go down, change its algorithm, or ban your account at a moment's notice. Your website can't do any of those things to you.
2. Get Clients Off Social Media and Into a System
The goal is to stop conducting business through DMs as quickly as possible. Mine is set up so that anyone who messages me on Facebook gets an automatic reply directing them to fill out a contact form. That form feeds directly into my CRM, 17hats, which kicks off my whole booking workflow.
No back-and-forth in Messenger. No information lost in a thread. Just a clean process that runs whether or not Instagram is operational.
If a full CRM feels like too much right now, start smaller: set up an auto-reply on Instagram and Facebook that directs people to your email. At minimum, get their contact info somewhere you actually own.
3. Build an Email List
Email marketing sounds old-fashioned until you realize that posting to 27,000 followers and reaching maybe 300 of them is the actual problem.
When I send an email, I know it lands in someone's inbox. They might delete it... but they saw it. With social media, you're posting into a feed controlled by an algorithm that wants you to pay for ads. You have no idea who's actually seeing your content.
I only send one newsletter a month, but having that list means I can reach my people directly, without a platform in the middle deciding whether they see it.
The Bottom Line
Instagram doesn't owe you anything. It doesn't have a customer service number. It doesn't care if your business goes down with it. That's not a criticism... it's just reality, and the sooner we build businesses that aren't dependent on any single platform, the better.
Website + CRM + Email list. None of these things have to be super complicated or expensive. They're just the foundation that keeps your business yours.
Hear the full episode on The Bright Balloon podcast, here.
