For Easter Sunday don’t put all of your eggs in one social media basket.
With the upheaval over Facebook’s information gathering and sharing ethical crisis, it’s another sign that your own website (and building an email list) is the most important platform for your business.
A few years ago, Vine was the hot, new, video version of Instagram. It was great for some Vine stars. Their audiences grew quickly and looked like a great platform to morph into any type of business venture those stars might have wanted. Overnight, the platform died. (Why Vine Died.)
All those followers…gone. All that social media collateral…gone. All that social media influence…gone.
All that work to grow an audience and access to the audience was completely gone. They had to start all over again.
Social media platforms come and go. We’ve seen this with a number of them since MySpace began in the early 2000s. The great news is that they are mostly free. Who doesn’t love free! The downside is that relying on a free service that could implode as quickly as it exploded onto the scene is risky business.
Facebook sits in a tough spot. It’s been around and grown larger and more steadily than any other social platform. However, with growth comes responsibility and potential for such breaches of trust. That said, users willingly submitted very personal information to Facebook and its third-party advertisers by quickly skipping passed the statements that revealed using the the third-party app, quiz, etc. would allow them to access any information shared or created in Facebook. Click, we did it anyway.
Now, users are leaving or threatening to leave the social media platform. What will happen to all those connections and businesses that relied way too heavily on one or on all social media alone without anything else and any other way to reach their followers and potential clients?
Take Control of Your Online Presence
As business owners, you’re taking enough risk. You need a smart strategy. That strategy starts with a website. If you have your own domain and your own hosting (or a solid contract for hosting and site ownership), you can grow your own following and never fear when the next big thing in social media becomes the next big failure.
There are many reasons to have a website and just as many goals and functions for it. Some businesses use the website for eCommerce while others use it for lead generation. Whatever your goals and functional needs are, it’s all yours. You control it.
How to Grow Your Following
Blogging and Vlogging position you as the authority on your subject-matter. They also allow the visitors to get to know you a bit, see how you work, and learn more about your product or service. Be sure you put a “Subscribe” button and form to collect emails to share your content.
Are you struggling with what to write? Check out my blog post, “I don’t know what to write about.”
How to Grown Your Email List Further
Lead magnets offer your visitors something of value for the small price of their email address (and any other information you’d like to collect). For example, my lead magnet is a worksheet for branding and UX that users may download after submitting their name and email address.
Note: When we collect such information from visitors/users, we need a privacy statement.
Next Steps
If you’re interested in creating or reworking your own website, you may:
- Read more about How to Uncomplicate the Web or
- Contact me to get started.