Since the beginning of social media, creators and businesses have invested an untold number of hours towards building their audience in social channels.
And it makes sense. Social media is a low barrier way to reach an audience—everyone is on social media and anyone can reach them with the right combination of content and ad dollars.
But social media poses a big problem for creators & businesses: we don't own the relationship with our audience. The social media platform owns the audience relationship and we pay to reach them.
What are the costs to reach an audience? There's content, which costs time and money. Alternatively we can pay directly for ads to reach an audience. (A smart social media strategy will have little bit of both).
Almost everybody uses ads, but most truly successful social media channels get their longevity from sustained organic relevance. In aggregate, all the free organic content from creators adds a lot of value to social media platforms—because good content provides value to the right audience.
So, anyone using social media for business should recognize that social media platforms are an intermediary that extracts and drains value from us. And we should ask:
"How can I give more value directly to my audience?"
The short answer: develop an "owned channel" where you can reach your audience directly.
The classic example is the email list. Drive social followers to become email subscribers, and you can have a more direct connection with you audience.
Easier said than done, right?
It takes time and investment to build a social media audience who is large enough (and engaged enough) to join your owned channel. Usually, you need some kind of free offer to get them engaged. Very often, you need to advertise that offer in a technical and sophisticated way.
But regardless of your marketing sophistication or business size, everyone using social media for business can benefit from asking this big question:
"How can I extract more long-term value from social media platforms?"
