Did the recent Facebook vs Australian Media brinkmanship give you pause to reflect on your digital marketing priorities?
At any point did you look at Facebook’s cheery What’s on your mind? post prompt and think, “Hmmm…what the devil are you up to, Facebook?” or “Could they do this to my business?”
Truth is, if you have a business page then, to some degree, Facebook is already putting the squeeze on you. That almighty algorithm has been meddling with who-sees-what since you posted your very first message on the platform.
As we’ve written about before, that community you’ve nurtured on Facebook (and other social platforms) isn’t yours. You just rent it from them. And, as we saw during the stand-off with local media publishers, Facebook can (and will) block access to its audience. For a while there, too, even government health and emergency pages were blocked—something Facebook later acknowledged was a mistake. But, still…you get the message.
We’ve been banging on about the importance of email in your digital marketing mix for years. Call us old-fashioned, but a well-looked-after database of addresses and regular, good quality communications are potent tools that can deliver great insights about your customers, deepen your connections with them, and move them into and through your sales funnel.
[We’ll take an email address over a bunch of Facebook ‘follows’ any day of the week.]
In fact, we like to put email at the very centre of things.
Has the perceived convenience of social media led you to neglect email over the last few years? Are you thinking it might be time to take a fresh new look at this ‘old-school’ way of doing things?
It might be time you did.
After all, ’email’ is about the only digital realm where people—not algorithms—are in control of what’s going on.
You and Email should be friends.
We’d be delighted to introduce you.
Drop us a note in the fields here and we’ll get back to you pronto.