3 easy ways to get your audience out of the Facebook chokehold
Let's face it we are close to living in a post-Facebook news feed era.
If you're a publisher, brand, entrepreneur or marketer I am willing to bet a $1 that Facebook has a pretty good chokehold on your audience.
And to loosen the grip you have occasionally distracted the data giant with small and large budgets to loosen its grip.
But that super 3-way chokehold of ownership always gets tight again and you realize, no money no audience.
But there is light beyond the armpit.
And in this post I wanted to highlight a few ways to make sure you are owning your brand, your audience and your data.
You can’t manage or own what you don’t measure.
Data is a trillion dollar industry and it’s exactly how some of the largest tech companies like Facebook are able to make more cash then we can count.
But for a lot of entrepreneurs and brands data is not a priority and understanding that data can be a full time job(s).
Is it possible to truly own your brand and your audience unless you also understand and own your data?
Here’s why ….
Let's take this old client of mine for example.
The first is a previous client of mine who was music industry influencer and he had a massive social media following.
He would monetize this following and work with brands, organizations and other influencers to make a pretty good living. His biggest platform was his Facebook page that had over 700k followers and a crazy 10% engagment rate.
One day he logged on and got a notification of copyright infringement.
He ignored it …
He got another notice and ignored that one as well.
You see where this is going.
A few weeks later he went to his brand page and realized it had been shut down by Facebook.
And all 700k followers we’re gone.
When he came to me to help rebuild his audience the first thing I asked was what kind of data did you have on his followers?
He said “nothing”.
I asked about email list, website traffic, even phone numbers.
All he had was the 20k Twitter followers and 10k we’re fake because his main platform was Facebook.
Eventually, we were able to recover his page but all the content was gone. He had to start over again but at least he had the audience back (Kinda).
After all of his content was removed his organic reach was pretty much destroyed and his engagement rate never went above 4% ever again.
The lesson here:
IF YOU DONT OWN YOUR DATA YOUR CANT OWN YOUR BRAND.
Don’t build your house on rented land
Here is how you can make sure as you build you brand and audience you are also owning them.
1. Make sure you have a website! On a domain and hosting account you own!
I know a lot of people will tell you that websites are not to build your brand.
That’s just WRONG!
You need an HQ for your brand.
Think of your website as the ultimate interest signal for you audience. Meaning this is the way your audience shows you they actually care about your brand because they visit your website.
If they are willing to escape the chokehold of Facebook or Instagram for even just a few minutes to look at your site. This means they are very interested in you or your content.
Make sure your website mentions, talks about and supports your brand and your name this will be the first step in a strong SEO strategy.
So when users Google you they can find you.
Always send people to your website to get important updates about you. This can be a blog, calendar or even just a contact form to inquire about your services.
Install or make sure you have analytics on your site.
You need to know where users are coming from, what they are doing when they get to your site and if they are finding what they are looking for.
Get pixels on your website. (Even the FB one Ughhh)
All the main players FB, Twitter and Even Pinterest have a way for you to add their pixels to your site so that any users who visits your website from that platform you can later retarget with paid media.
This is great making sure you can lead user down a conversion funnel to own the relationship beyond social media.
This leads me to the next tip.
2. Collect EMAILS and or Phone numbers!
As platform algorithms change daily you are reaching less and less of your audience organically every day.
So if your a brand with 4MM followers most of your organic post weekly are only being seen by around 50–100k of them (on a good day).
If you have 4MM emails and you sent a weekly newsletter, depending on your interest category and open rates (Usually between 5–20%) you could reach 1–2MM of them per week.
And the better the content, the more opens you get and more traffic to your site.
Ah Ha! your on your way to brand ownership!
3. Capitalize on your insights and user trends
This is the key to growing your brand on any platform is knowing your audiences behavioral trends.
Post content and engage with your audience based on their consumption behavior not yours.
Look to your facebook, Instagram or email insites and see when users are more likely to open, engage and share your content based on past updates.
This will inform you of your evolving ownership strategy.
Also look to the types of content your audience engages with the most.
If you constantly post different types of content.
Video, images of yourself or text updates. Notice what types of content get you the most engagement.
Then look at that content and if you discover that videos posted every other day at 11am is your sweet spot for growth.
Then Boom! Your off!
Doing these 3 things will be the key to not only building a great brand but making sure you OWN IT as well.
And your audience will be free of the Facebook chokehold as well!
