This is an era of social media and it’s quite certain you must be using at least one or two popular social network for sharing content on a regular basis.
Social media is evolving fast and it’s a proven medium to drive results. It has converted many new faces into influencers in just few days. Do you remember the wink of Priya Prakash Varrier? or those badly composed killer songs by Dhinchak Pooja? There are many names who became popular in no time just because of the power of Social Media.
Although, it’s advisable to be present on Social Media, it’s certainly a bad idea to completely rely on one channel for growth. There are brands and people who get all of their traffic from just one network. In this post I’ll cover why it’s a dangerous thing to put all of your eggs in one basket.
It’s the time you should started thinking about social platforms bit differently…
Social Media Can Disappear
Few years back one of my YouTube channels was deactivated due to some violation of the community guidelines. I somehow managed to get it restored after submitting an appeal.
Imagine you have worked hard in building your audience on social network and suddenly one day you realize the platform is no more into existence for whatever the reason may be.
What if it will happen to you! What will you do? How do you reach your audience? Do you even know who your followers are?
Last month when TikTok was banned in India along with many other Chinese apps, millions of content creators on the platform had to suffer the same thing. They were left with no choice but to see other alternative platforms. Now, few other countries like US and Australia are also looking for similar ban.
Similar thing happened with millions of Indian bloggers recently when Google lost access to it’s domain “blogspot.in” which is one of the most prominent blogging platforms globally. As a result of this incident, bloggers on this platform have faced sudden drop in traffic. Drop in traffic on a website means drop in signups, loss of affiliate revenue, loss in ranking and more.
Social Media is Dynamic
Internet is full of uncertainties and surprises.
By the time you establish your online presence or figure out a way to get followers and engagements, there’s always a possibility things might not be the same as they were before.
Most of the primary social networks are driven by machine learning. You might be getting good results today from social media but what if that platform decides to change their algorithm suddenly! You’re stuck.
Gone are the days when the posts were able to easily reach majority of the people in network. Now when all platforms are monetized by ads, organic reach has been compromised. It would need a ginormous following to get a good traffic from these platforms.
Since the inception of Social Media, it’s growing and changing very fast. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, every social platform is making frequent changes in the algorithms. And most of the time these changes hit users hard. We don’t have much control over these platform now-a-days.
Social Media is Vulnerable
15th July 2020 is marked as a dark day for Twitter when 130 Verified Twitter accounts of high profile users were hacked and used to post tweets to promote a cryptocurrency scam.
Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Kanye West, Warren Buffett are few names of the prominent people whose Twitter accounts were compromised.
This wasn’t the first time it happened on any social platform. Hacking incidents are increasing day-by-day. Anything on the web is prone to such attacks.
Imagine one of your social profiles with good audience base gets hacked and you are left with no way to communicate with the audience. In such scenarios you are not only barred from reaching to your follower base, but the account can also be used to post inappropriate content – all under your identity.
Social Media Can Break
Nothing in this world is free from faults. It’s a hard truth and social media isn’t an exception. There’s a long list of outages on different social networks.
In 2008, for almost one day Facebook was completely down because of a bug that affected many of its 80 million users. The website was at an early stage and the impact of this outage was low.
More than a decade later in March 2019, Facebook experienced the most severe outage in its history when the users across the globe weren’t able to access their apps – Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. It was a day-long outage which had impacted 2.3 billion users across the world on the platform that time.
While people started using the platforms as usual, many business owners and entrepreneurs were left evaluating how many sales they lost during the outage.
In a nutshell, here’s why you shouldn’t rely on social media stand-alone:
– You don’t own the platform. Nor the platforms are permanent. You can lose the traffic all of sudden if the platform is no more there.
– You don’t have the control over your audience which simply means you can’t remarket them directly.
– Social Media is changing. Organic reach will continue to decrease.
– One bad post can get your account suspended permanently.
– The accounts can be hacked and misused to post inappropriate content under your identity. It could tarnish the brand image.
What you should do?
‘Diversification’ is the solution
It’s simple – don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
Have a backup channel. Get your own website and build your email list in parallel to social your social media activity.
Having a personal website is always important for creators. It’s a smart step. It helps you build your email list fast. With an email list in your hand, you are always safe. You can reach your users, communicate your messages, sell your services anytime even if one of your social platforms breaks.
You don’t have the control of switching your social media following from one platform to the other. But you can always switch between Email Marketing Platforms. You own your email list.
Take some time to anticipate the involved risk in operating on single medium. Having a website and an email list is now best practice and also a basic need for a sustainable digital strategy for your business.
Let me know your thoughts on this article. Do you agree we need to stop relying on social media marketing completely for results?
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