There is a hidden danger that lurks when you spend years building your business’ reputation and brand awareness somewhere other than your own website.
You invest all of this time creating content. Video, pictures, audio, text.
You put the time in to make everything, revised, scheduled, and uploaded to your social media accounts.
One day after a decade of publishing to your profiles and then- POOF!
It’s gone.
From 100k authentic followers, with years of effort- to zero.
You reach out, and the sites refuse to hear your appeals or respond to any protests.
It’s happened to the best of us.
Maybe you think that it could never happen to you. Trust, it can. And, there’s a chance that it will.
First Hand Experience
From first hand experience in managing digital marketing campaigns, one of our clients went viral.
All of the followers were real people. From 2k to 32k followers on Instagram.
She had a tv personality and was working on developing a non-profit organization for at-risk youth.
In two days, we were able to raise $134,000 for her organization.
However, a few weeks later, her account was banned because of a data breach.
We were no longer able to access the account.
All of the traffic going towards her campaign stopped, and there was nothing that we could do other than continuing to reach out to Meta.
Can you imagine how frustrating this is?
Fortunately, we were able to recover the page with all of the followers and images intact.
That’s not the case for many.
What You Missed
Whenever you post content to another application or website that you don’t own, you have, for the most part, given them control and power over your content.
Essentially, anything that they want to do, hold it ransom, sell it to a bidder, delete it, they can do it.
This is what you’ll see in the Agreements, Terms and Conditions, and other policies.
Did you read every line of those links before using them or did you click Agree like every person does.
What permissions did you give? All of it.
The best way to avoid this kind of catastrophe is by removing yourself from the internet entirely…
Not really. That probably wouldn’t help your bottom line.
Do This Instead
Build, develop, and manage your own website.
You’ll have complete control.
You can determine what and when something gets posted, deleted, updated, or removed.
You can choose who can leave comments, write your own terms, and decide who can do what with your business.
You don’t have to worry about violating someone else’s terms, or being scared that they’ll shut your business’ profile down.
You don’t have to worry about all of your hard work being flushed down the toilet.
Not anymore.
You’re not too small to have your own website.
Some people think that they should sidestep the website.
You shouldn’t.
It’s not that expensive.
It’s certainly not more expensive than losing all of that time.
Why would you trust a faceless corporation with your valuable assets?
Ask someone that’s lost all of their content if it was worth it.
Ask them if they regret not owning their content and media.
Don’t make the same mistakes.
Start making your website sooner rather than later.