Recently, Twitter has been having some reliability issues. Errors, tweet counts, follow counts, and fail whales have been more the rule than the exception in the last two weeks. Twitter says that this is due to problems in their internal network structure which have been exacerbated by heavy tweeting on the World Cup.

Such widespread, long term outages are a bit uncommon for a web service, but who can complain, seeing as Twitter is a free service? It does raise an issue though: what if you rely on Twitter as a primary means of communicating with your clients and supporters? Do you have a backup system in place?

Possibilities are many: sending updates from a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile, a FriendFeed account, or with Friendster. Obviously you don’t need them all, but having one or two alternatives is just good planning.

And remember to promote all your social media channels on your website!