📣 The Perils of Relying on Socials for Marketing

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By now, you've already gotten the gist that I'm not hugely into socials. Don't get me wrong, they can be fun and I still have my personal insta account that I check once every blue moon.

And still, I stand firm on the position that the less we're on socials, the better. If you want to know more about this, you can take a look at my work on digital well-being at Log Off - Live More.​

The mental health consequences of social media can be quite serious - even for adults.

The Business Side of Things

When you market yourself on socials almost exclusively, there are three risks:

• Your building your house on borrowed land
• You don't own the audience
• You depend on the algorithm for distribution

Let's look at them one by one:

You're building your house on borrowed land

This is a really helpful analogy: Social media is a lot like we're building our house on borrowed land without a solid contract. We're on these platforms and invest a lot of time into building an audience and communities on there - and we're not the ones who ultimately call the shots.

It's like if the land owner woke up one morning and decided "not today, anymore" or the post office said "only 5 letters from you today", when you have an entire bag ful that you want to send.

In a way, we're Mark Zuckerberg's freelance team members No. 21,566,789 and No. 234,576,444. We're creating content for platforms that rely on the production of content - and yet, despite our key role in this, we have no say over anything that's going on. That's a risk.

You don't own the audience

What this means is that you don't own the way to get in touch with the audience. You're relying on the intermediary of the platform and the algorithm and if you chose to want to walk away, you really wouldn't be able to without losing all your contacts.

You don't have the addresses, emails, phone numbers, or anything of the people you're creating your work for. It's all on the platform and you depend on it.

It's different with a newsletter for example. When somebody - like you right now - opts into an email, you're in direct contact with them until they choose to unsubscribe. You can regularly download your contact list in your business and if one newsletter provider's terms of service change in a way that you don't like them, you can download your list and take it somewhere else.

You can't do that on socials. When you leave or want to make changes, your audience stays behind - together with all the work you had to invest to build the audience.

You depend on the algorithm for distribution

How annoyed are you about the algorithm on a scale of 1-10? 12? Good, then you're about ready for a change :D

An algorithm is a set of instructions to solve a complex task. In the case of social media, it solves the taks of how to get the right content in front of the right people - only that what you and I as business owners would define as right is not the same as what social media companies define as right due to their business models.

There's an inherent conflict in that - you want organic reach, Meta wants to make money from targeted ads.

And when the algorithm changes, you're back to square one and need to figure out your marketing strategy once again.

A helpful analogy for this is the post office I mentioned above. Imagine you go to the post office every day with a bag full of 50 letters. Some days, they take 5 and send them where they need to go. On other days, it's one, and then on a miracle day because you did a little dance and they like you to dance, they send 10.

Of course, there are things you can do to make your marketing on socials more robust. The underlying dynamic is still the same.

You're relying on the algorithm for distribution. A newsletter, for example, goes straight into an inbox.

Stats - Engagement Rates

I'll leave you with some fascinating stats that show how much of a wobbly business case socials really are. Engagement rates - the average number of interactions your social media content receives per follower - are pretty low.

Social Media

TikTok is the most engaging socials platform. The average engagement rate on there is 5.96%. For Instagram it's 0.83%, Facebook is at 0.13% and Twitter at 0.05% across industries. For example: Travel does best better on Instagram with an engagement rate of 1.41%.

You can check out these stats for yourself here. I'm referencing a study by Socialinsider.

Email Marketing

It's a different story for email marketing. I found another study on that for you here, by Campaign Monitor.

You can't apply the same metrics between email and socials. Email benchmarks look at open rate and click to open rates (CTOR). A compares the number of unique clicks to unique opens.

Across all industries, the open rate for newsletters average at 21.5%, the average CTOR was at 10.5%.

Let these numbers sink in for a moment...

And hit reply to tell me what you think!

Sending my best,

Johanna 💎

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