BRX Pro Tip: You Don’t Own Your Social Media Platforms
Stone Payton: Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor, Stone Payton here with you. Lee, this is so true if you just think about it for a moment. But I think sometimes we forget this, but you really don’t own your social media platforms.
Lee Kantor: Right. This is something that just came to my – we’ve talked about this in the past, but something happened recently that came to my attention that just kind of triggered this again.
Lee Kantor: There was a company that was using LinkedIn as their platform that they do everything on. And they have a service that’s a Chrome extension that ties into LinkedIn. And that’s their whole business. You use their Chrome extension on your computer, and it ties into LinkedIn, and it ties into this software, and then you get value from that. They have a way to track some stuff. And that’s their whole business.
Lee Kantor: So, LinkedIn changed something. They can’t do that anymore. That’s done. It’s like it’s impossible to use their system now. Everything, their whole business is now in a holding pattern until they can figure out how to get around this or how to get permission to keep using it. Like they’re in a DEFCON 10 situation.
Lee Kantor: And that’s what kind of triggered this tip about you don’t own your social media platform. You have to build redundancy. You have to have a backup plan and a workaround. This is something that it should literally terrify you if this is all you’re doing. If you’re relying on – your whole business is relying on the rented land and the algorithm of an Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook or Google, and you don’t own any of that. They have the final say. They make the decisions. They can change the algorithm tomorrow, and your reach disappears. How many times have people’s websites’ traffic just gone in the toilet because of an algorithm change? They can shut down your account, and all of your work is gone overnight. Bam! You have to have redundancy. You have to have a way to communicate with the people most important to you.
Lee Kantor: At Business RadioX, we have an email list. Every one of our clients, we encourage them to build email lists around the people most important to them. We have our podcast feed on our website first; it doesn’t go on Apple or Spotify or any of these other ones. We keep it on our website so no one can mess with it. It’s ours. It’s on our website. We do our shows live. We have ways to capture all this content ourselves locally, not dependent on any other platform. So if any one of the platforms we work with disappears, we’d still be here.
Lee Kantor: That’s what redundancy looks like. You have to be able to capture email addresses. You have to own your content and put it in a place that you control. You have to be able to build direct relationships that don’t require an algorithm’s permission.
Lee Kantor: Sure, you can use social media to drive people to channels you own, but look at social media platforms not as the end-all, but just a discovery tool. This is like when you go to Costco, and they’re handing out samples. The social platforms are the sample. They can get a taste of something, but that’s not where the stuff has to live. You have to have your client or prospect get to you directly and build a channel that’s direct to them that doesn’t require the use of any other algorithm or social media platform. That cannot be your foundation.
Lee Kantor: And the goal isn’t to abandon social media. Just make sure you’re not dependent on it. Build multiple pathways to your audience so that no single platform can put you out of business.
