You’ve probably spent a lot of time, maybe even a lot of money, acquiring a social media audience. But, how is that algorithm treating you? Are the posts you spend time painstakingly captioning and tagging resonating with that audience? Are they even being seen by your audience?
Tobias Roediger, of RAVE, joined us recently to share how he guides his clients through reclaiming their audience. With these tips, you can reclaim your audience too.
Some background. There are three main types of media that when used together provide the structure for a complete marketing strategy: earned, owned, and paid media. Earned media is one of the most trusted forms of media because it includes write-ups in newspapers and magazines, as well as external reviews that were not paid for by your company. Owned media comprises anything your company has complete control over like your website and blog. Paid media is likely the most well know because advertising is everywhere.
In most textbooks, you’ll see social media lumped into the owned media category. But, we categorically disagree. Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (among so many others) do not offer you complete control of your channel. They set the rules, then they change them…often. This leaves businesses wondering what they need to do to “beat the algorithm”, spending lots of time each day, week, month testing what might work now to get more followers and to increase engagement. Tobias considers these channels Leased Media, not Owned. We’re renting space on these platforms, spending money to increase our follower counts, then spending even more money to allow each post we create to be seen by those followers.
Instead of spending all of our resources in this futile attempt to “go viral”, he advised us to invest in our truly Owned Media channels. Let’s focus on driving traffic to our websites, blogs, podcasts, apps, and newsletters where we can capture our audience’s information and keep them engaged.
There are huge benefits to putting your energy into owned channels like:
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Opportunity to create a community
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Foster relationships directly with your audience, not through the Facebook intermediary
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You control your data and can analyze it for your KPIs, not relying on the often misleading metrics provided by social platforms
What are you waiting for? We’re immediately adjusting our weekly time blocking to reflect our shift from leased media channels to Haven-owned channels. How do you plan to start taking action to reclaim your audience?
For more tips on productivity, read our recent blog: Productivity Hacks We Swear By