Recently, a social media scheduling platform sent out this notification:

Facebook and Instagram notified us that they paused our integrations on both platforms. This resulted in both an inability to schedule posts on the platforms and caused historical posts using our platform to seem to disappear.

In some cases, posts didn’t just SEEM to disappear, they DID disappear.  Chaos ensued….for some.  Not for us.

Why the chaos?  Some social media marketing firms enter content directly into a scheduling platform and track data through it as well.  This platform went down, and they lost all posts, for all clients, both historic and scheduled.  And, they lost the data that is tracked as well.  Writing content is extremely time consuming, and that content is gone?  Yikes.

Our advice:  if you use any social scheduling platform, have a backup plan. 

1 – don’t enter content directly into the platform.  Most social scheduling platforms allow bulk uploading via a .csv file.  Write content in excel or google sheets, then download as a .csv and upload from there.  You’ll always have a backup of your content in case you need to switch platforms or (gasp) post manually.

2 – have a backup platform or partner at the ready. 

3 – learn to pull the data you want directly out of the social platforms.  Don’t rely solely on the data that the scheduling platform provides.

We did all three, and though it’s been inconvenient and frustrating, we’ve been able to keep campaigns rolling.  This may all seem like very simple stuff, but we thought it worth reiterating as we have watched this situation unfold.

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