Founder & Chief Executive Officer
I ask my clients this regularly. What happens if social media no longer exists tomorrow?
What happens if a platform gives in to political pressure, or has a technical failure, and nobody knows whether it is coming back or how long it stays down? There have been plenty of occasions where exactly that uncertainty was live.
The question behind the question is the one that matters. Do you have an offline strategy? Meaning a strategy that does not depend on a platform. Can your website capture proper contact information from the people who visit it, and do you have a newsletter that connects you with your audience somewhere you can reach them directly?
The scenario stopped being theoretical a while ago.
TikTok went dark across the United States in January 2025. Cloudflare measured DNS traffic to TikTok-related domains dropping by as much as 85% compared with the previous week, with traffic from ByteDance’s own network falling as much as 95%. Service began returning roughly 14 hours later, and traffic was still sitting 14% below normal a day after that. Cloudflare also recorded DNS traffic to alternative platforms surging as much as 74% within hours, since audiences scattered immediately.
Fourteen hours is survivable. The useful part is what it demonstrated, which is that access to an audience you did not build on your own property can be removed by decisions you have no involvement in. Major outages happen too, and during both kinds of event the honest answer to how long this lasts is that nobody knows yet.
Any business whose entire pipeline ran through that one app spent those hours with no way to reach anybody.
Summary TikTok went dark across the US in January 2025, with Cloudflare measuring DNS traffic down as much as 85% and service returning roughly 14 hours later. Access can be removed by decisions you have no part in.
Platform risk gets attention when something dramatic occurs. The ordinary version costs more over time.
Even while every platform is working perfectly, something else decides how many of your own followers see what you publish. Socialinsider puts the average Instagram reach rate at around 3.5% of followers, down 12% year over year, and reaching ten percent or more was normal in 2020. Metricool’s 2026 study, covering over a million accounts and close to 40 million posts, found overall post reach down 31% year over year.
So the daily reality is publishing to an audience you assembled and reaching a small fraction of it, with the fraction shrinking. That is the praying for the algorithm position, where you have done everything right and still depend on a system deciding whether you appear during the ten minutes somebody spends scrolling.
Summary Socialinsider puts average Instagram reach at around 3.5% of followers, down 12% year over year, and Metricool found post reach down 31% across over a million accounts. Reach of your own audience keeps shrinking.
An offline strategy starts with your website doing more than describing your business.
Plenty of sites explain what a company does and offer a contact form nobody fills in. The job is capturing details from people who are interested but not ready, since those are the majority. A visible signup for something genuinely worth receiving, a form that asks for an email rather than a committed enquiry, a reason to hand over contact details before somebody is ready to buy.
Every captured email is a connection that exists independently of any platform. Strong website design puts those capture points where people actually reach them rather than buried below the fold, and a capable web developer makes sure they work on a phone and feed into wherever you keep your list.
Worth adding the acquisition side too. Search engine optimization brings new people to that website continuously, from a channel no social platform controls, which means your ability to meet new people does not pause when an app does. A good SEO company builds that alongside the capture, since traffic without capture leaks and capture without traffic sits idle.
Summary Your website needs to capture details from interested people who are not ready to buy, with visible signups that work on a phone. Search engine optimization keeps bringing new people from a channel no platform controls.
The second half is where you actually use what you captured.
An email arrives in an inbox. It is not ranked against a thousand other pieces of content, and it is not subject to a system deciding whether this person should see you today. You end up in front of somebody’s face because you have a direct route there.
The contrast with social reach is stark. Email open rates across industries sit somewhere in the twenty to thirty percent range depending on the study, against the roughly 3.5% of followers an average Instagram post reaches. Even allowing for the two being measured differently, the gap is not subtle.
A newsletter also lets you say more than a post can, and it reaches people who have deliberately opted in, which makes them a warmer audience than anybody scrolling. Quality email marketing services handle the delivery side so you can concentrate on sending something people are pleased to receive rather than something that reads as a broadcast.
Summary Email arrives in an inbox without being ranked against other content. Open rates sit in the twenty to thirty percent range against roughly 3.5% of followers for an average Instagram post, and subscribers opted in deliberately.
The part people get wrong is treating this as insurance they can activate in an emergency.
A list you have not emailed in eight months is barely a list. The addresses exist, and the relationship does not, so sending something urgent into that silence performs about as well as a cold email. The connection needs maintaining while everything is fine, which is the only way it is there when something is not.
That means sending consistently at whatever cadence you can genuinely sustain. Monthly is fine. Something useful, in your voice, with no demand attached most of the time. The habit is what keeps the channel alive.
Same logic applies to the website. Content published steadily keeps it visible in search and keeps new people arriving, so the whole system stays warm rather than being something you dust off during a crisis.
Summary A list you have not emailed in months is barely a list, since the addresses exist without the relationship. Send consistently at a sustainable cadence so the channel is alive before you need it.
The practical version takes very little time to start.
Check whether your website captures anything at all beyond a contact form, and if it does not, add one signup somewhere visible with a genuine reason to use it. Export whatever contacts you already have, since most businesses have more than they think sitting in their email and their phone. Send one email to that list, even if it has been a long time, and simply be useful in it. Then set a cadence you can hold.
Check your own numbers while you are there. Look at how many of your followers your recent posts actually reached, since seeing the real figure tends to be more persuasive than any argument I can make.
If mapping this out properly would help, a marketing consultant or fractional CMO can build the structure with you, and marketing training can get your team running it. The point is having the connection in your own hands before anything forces the question.
Summary Add one visible signup to your website, export the contacts you already have, send one useful email, and set a sustainable cadence. Then check how many of your own followers your recent posts actually reached.
Social media could become unavailable tomorrow, and a version of that has already happened. Even on the days every platform works, something other than you decides how many of your own followers see your work.
An offline strategy fixes that. A website that captures contact information, and a newsletter that puts you in an inbox rather than in a queue. Both of those are yours.
Build them, nurture them while everything is calm, and stay in control of your connection to your audience.
Sources:
Cloudflare, analysis of the TikTok shutdown in the United States on 19 January 2025 (DNS traffic to TikTok-related domains fell by as much as 85% compared with the previous week, traffic from ByteDance’s network fell as much as 95%, service restoration began roughly 14 hours later, and DNS traffic to alternative platforms rose as much as 74%).
https://blog.cloudflare.com/tiktok-ban-traffic-decline-alternatives-rednote/
Socialinsider and Metricool, reported via Sotrender (average Instagram reach rate of approximately 3.50% of followers, down 12% year over year; Metricool’s 2026 study of 1,059,949 accounts and nearly 40 million posts found overall post reach down 31% year over year).
https://www.sotrender.com/blog/2026/08/instagram-reach-is-down-what-the-data-actually-says/
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