[ilovecaching]

My wife makes all of her income through Facebook products. She's tried other platforms, and none of them were sustainable over Facebook and Instagram, partly because of the difficulty of building a following like the one she has on Instagram, partly because they market isn't using other products. For her, people walking away from Facebook or Instagram means losing her livelihood and giving up her dream job.

Facebook is also the place where we keep in touch with relatives living thousands of miles away from us, who are just technologically literate enough to get on Facebook and post, but not much else. We also met on Facebook, so we owe our entire relationship to the platform.

So for us, Facebook has done a lot of good, we rely on it for the nice life we have together, and it provides something that can't currently be replaced by other platforms.

[RodgerTheGreat]

It's great that you've been able to carve out a successful niche, but it's also an extremely tenuous one: at any time, minor policy changes by Facebook (even without malice) could destroy your livelihood. What's your plan for when that happens?

[ilovecaching]

We appreciate the fact that influencers are susceptible to the tumultuous nature of social media, but most jobs come with the risk of your company suddenly tanking or letting you go. In a way, she works for the companies she's using to sell her products and generate revenue from, and I think that's ok.

[stupidbird]

Facebook has sold all the private messages that you've shared with your wife.

[chillacy]

Such an inaccurate description of the situation that you’re doing damage to this position. Facebook didn’t have adequate privacy disclosure when users logged into apps like Spotify which could then pull conversations to display in their UI.

[fastball]

What does your wife sell?

[ilovecaching]

Handmade clothing. She runs the entire operation by herself. She also does sponsored health and beauty products.

[giancarlostoro]

Does she use Etsy by chance? Seems like the big place for that kind of thing.

[ilovecaching]

She actually started on Etsy, but it basically paid nothing. Perhaps, the markets are just extremely fickle, but he following is primarily on Instagram and Facebook. She's trying to break into Youtube just to increase exposure, which I think is going reasonably well.

[wallawe]

Email is a very solid way of maintaining contact with the people who are interested in your products, so I would encourage her to put strong emphasis on building a list if she hasn't already.

This could be helpful in the event that another channel fails.

[giancarlostoro]

Yeah unless your product is super unique, you still need to market outside of Etsy is the vibe I get. That's good, yeah YouTube and IG are pretty good for those kinda things, not sure of some of the other ones out there that are common for influencers. Might be worth looking at where people are getting paid to be influencers on and that might be a trail worth following.