I’ve been minimising my use of social media the last few months.
So the big Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage today hasn’t really affected me at all.
And I have an email list. So I can still connect with my audience while the rest of the social-media-addicted world wails and gnashes their teeth.
(I can just imagine what the feeds will be like when it all finally comes back online.)
Anyhow, it serves as an important reminder to us all.
An email list puts you way ahead of those who live and die under Zuck’s rules.
If you have one, you can give yourself a high-five.
But unless you have control of your subscriber data, you are risking a disaster.
That means keeping multiple, secure, fresh backups.
You can do it yourself, of course, but that requires time, effort and consistency to ensure you don’t mess up and make an even bigger problem for yourself.
(I’ve written an article about the pitfalls if you want to know more.)
Or you can use an inexpensive service like ListLockr.
You just set it up once and you’re done.
After that, you’ll always have a fresh, secure backup of your email subscribers ready in case your email marketing provider finds themselves in the same position as Facebook today.
Or in case you ever get hacked, booted or accidentally delete your list.
But whatever you do…please backup your subscribers.
