You need to build your own thing, and get away from social media posting. I’ve wanted to share this information for a while because of the underground rumblings coursing through the online world.
The announcements around Facebook+, WhatsApp+ and Instagram+ are already public. Consider these the tip of the spear as these companies, and all of the other social platforms, ramp up the demands for your use of their system. It is well-known that social platforms manipulate your audience numbers in order to encourage advert, or sponsored, campaigns. This is the next step in the process, as the shareholders demand increasing returns.
Right now you might think that as the viewer these changes don’t affect you, but they will. The groups you belong to might come at a cost, the size of your feed can be throttled unless you pay for complete access. As a business, the changes will happen the fastest and with the most impact. To promote anything with some level of control is going to cost. Certainly, on face value the numbers are not that high. Consolidate it with regular access and things look different.
When I’ve spoken about this previously, it has been misinterpreted as me saying “social media is dead”. That’s incorrect. Social media is going to be so tightly controlled that if you aren’t paying, your attempts to successfully reach an audience will be dead.
What you need to do now is make sure your website is built, functions well, and that you are posting your content there. Your first question is “what about my audience, my audience reach, my website doesn’t get enough traffic”. Here’s the thing. You create, and post, on your website and then share to your social media feeds, driving traffic to your site.
Why do it this way? You remain in control of the material you create. If your post gets reported, if your account is banned, if there’s a copyright strike, the work you’ve done is gone, and in some cases you can never access it again. If the work you’ve done is safely contained on your site, not only does it remain accessible via the other feeds, your existing audience can share it – and you can share it at some point in the future without having to trawl through all the other stuff on these platforms to do it.
Video is the tough nut to crack, and here I don’t have a good answer. Sure, you can duplicate from YouTube to Odysee, or DailyMotion, DTube or Rumble, amongst others, but it’s effectively the same thing as posting on the social platforms. You aren’t in control of your creations. With increasing network speeds though, perhaps local hosting of both your site and your videos will become possible, with only the cost of storage to overcome.
What was the catalyst for sharing this information with you today, rather previously or at some future point? A post on X by Brent Lindeque who started Good Things Guy some 15-odd years ago or so, talking about the journey.
Brent highlights what he did, and how he has grown. He grew out of social media, become an internet destination instead. A home page for many. Good Things Guy is still available on the social channels, but … it all leads back to the website. He’s way ahead of the curve, and sets a good example. Build your own stuff, future you will thank you for it.
Then there’s this piece at MyBroadband on the cost of a WhatsApp subscription in order to access additional features. It simply reinforces the reality that social platforms have successfully mined your data for profit, and are now hunting the contents of your wallet.
You have the opportunity to create your audience on your site, seeing your things, with a much better chance of reducing the need to compete with others in your field. Do it now, before the social platforms force you to scrabble for attention in a space you don’t control.
Morne Condon 