I recently went to open one of my social media apps on my phone and all I got was a blank screen. The good old shut down my phone and turn it back on again fixed the issue, but what if it hadn’t? What if that app was just gone from my phone forever and I had no way to contact any of my followers from that app?
In this particular case, it was a reading app that I use just for fun, but if what if it was integral to growing my business? What if that was the only way I had to contact my prospects and clients?
I would have been screwed.
It sounds horrific, but it happens to people all the time. They get locked out of Facebook or LinkedIn, often with no explanation, and they have no way to reach the people with whom they’ve built relationships on that platform. Unless they had converted those leads off the platform and had another way to get in touch with them.
I love social media as a way to promote your content, grow your audience, and build relationships. When used properly, social media can even improve your SEO, but it needs to be a part of your social media strategy, not be your whole content marketing strategy.
If you know anything about me, you probably know blogging is my preferred way to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and educate your prospects. Let’s talk about some other reasons you should consider blogging as an alternative to social media.
Table of Contents
- Social Media Can Vanish
- Social Media Can Change Its Algorithm
- Social Media Owns Your Content
- You Can End Up in Social Media Jail
- Make Sure You Own the Content on Your Website
- Conclusion
Social Media Can Vanish
Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way, especially given recent events. Social media is not a reliable method of reaching your audience. Not only do we have to contend with the possibility that social media could vanish, but even without that, there’s always the fact that social media is constantly changing and newer platforms are replacing older platforms. There’s a reason Facebook has invested billions of dollars into buying other social media platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp: it’s because younger users are gravitating towards those platforms and they’re not using Facebook.
More recently, Facebook changed its name to Meta to reflect its efforts in developing a “metaverse”, which it says is the next evolution of social media. The company says Facebook will continue exist underneath Meta, but there’s no denying that the focus of the company is moving away from it’s traditional social media platform. Where does that leave the people who still rely on that platform to reach their customers and prospects?
Social Media Can Change Its Algorithm
This is the biggest reason I always tell people to own their content instead of relying on social media to get in touch with their audience. Before Facebook ads and boosted posts became the norm, a lot of people built businesses on Facebook. They set up a company page, or even used their personal page to engage with their customers and create posts to update their customers and attract new prospects to their business.
Then Facebook decided to change their algorithm, so even if someone was following you, they wouldn’t necessarily see your latest post unless you boosted it. People lost their businesses overnight because they had no other way to get in touch with their customers.
That kind of thing is still happening, if not to quite the same degree. The social media companies make the big bucks by changing the rule as soon as we figure them out, thereby forcing us to spend more time on their sites to figure out the new rules, and the cycle continues.
Social Media Owns Your Content
When you publish on social media, that content belongs to that social media site, not you. So no matter how much work you put into crafting just the right message and cultivating an audience for that message, you don’t own any of it. The social media platform owns your content, your message, and your audience. If you don’t have a place that you own (i.e. a WordPress website) to put your content, you are leaving your business in the hands of the people who own social media platforms, and they have proven again and again that they are not worthy of that trust.
This is the same reason I always recommend writing blog posts over LinkedIn articles. I know there are people who swear by LinkedIn articles as a way for improving your visibility on that platform, but the same rules apply to LinkedIn as any other social media site – you don’t own your content. Instead, LinkedIn owns your content, and they can decide to bury it (or even delete it) for any reason, or for no reason at all.
You Can End Up in Social Media Jail
I haven’t been kicked off social media myself (yet), but I do know other people who have gotten kicked off both Facebook and LinkedIn and never got an explanation as to why their accounts were deleted. They couldn’t get back on the platform for years before they were able to reclaim their name and rebuild their account. If those people had relied on Facebook for access to their customers, their businesses would have died overnight.
Make Sure You Own the Content on Your Website
I keep talking about the importance of having your own website to make sure you own your content, but there’s a reason specified a WordPress website, and no, I am not affiliated with WordPress. It’s just that some of the other common website platforms, such as Wix and SquareSpace, own your content when you use them to create a website.
That means you can’t take your content with you if you ever want to migrate your website to another platform, like WordPress. You’ll have to start from scratch because your previous website platform won’t let you take their content onto another website platform.
It could also cause problems if you want to distribute or republish the content in other places. I don’t usually recommend publishing the same content in different places across the internet for SEO reasons, but if you decide to do it as part of your strategy to repurpose your content, you might get a cease and desist letter from your website platform because you’ll technically be violating their copyright. I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility either.
Conclusion
While it’s true that social media has its drawbacks, I never want to give the impression that you should swear them off and only publish content on your website, because SEO can only take you so far. Once you publish a new blog post, social media can be a great way to spread the word and drive traffic to that new post before Google’s algorithm has time to index it. Driving traffic to a new piece of content that way can actually improve its search rankings because Google will see that traffic going to your content and use that information to determine that the content must be valuable if people are clicking through to check it out.
There is a time and a place for social media marketing, but it should not make up the entirety of your content marketing strategy.
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