Will You Let Facebook Steal Your Client List?

Lyric’s Marketing Tip #38:
Will You Let Facebook Steal Your List?

As a marketing professional who consults and guides my clients through their marketing decisions, I have had some heavy thoughts over the last week on what to do about the recent changes at Facebook and how they are going to distribute and deliver your marketing posts in 2015. If you haven’t heard, Facebook decided to pull what industry leaders are calling a “bait and switch“, effective this month that will drastically reduce the distribution of your business posts, unless you pay. What I mean by “bait and switch” is that while FB has encouraged us to build our networks, to grow our likes on our business pages so that we can have easy access to our clients and prospects, they will now require us to pay if we want to reach them. Good for them. Not good for us!

This is just another reason NOT to entrust your business marketing solely to social networks. Face it, we are only renting our LIKES and FOLLOWERS, FRIENDS and SUBSCRIBERS. In reality, they actually belong to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I kind of get it. Facebook wants the money, but aside from the money aspect, there is no way that FB can serve up all the content from the pages we have liked to our news feed. There needs to be a better way to get in front of everyone. This can put YOU in a bad position of potentially loosing control of your contacts. At the end of the day, you have to own your own list and be in control of your marketing. If Facebook shut down tomorrow and you had no more ad dollars to advertise, how would you communicate to your list?

Top marketing gurus (my favs) alibrown.com and caricole.com have always taught us that if you build a list of trusted followers and provide great info, you can build a successful business. Unfortunately, on FB and any social network, we are only renting our followers from them, if they decide to require us to pay to play, then that’s their perogogive. So I am rethinking how I am going to “play” on Facebook and how I will consult my clients in regard to their advertising on that medium.

My tip is this: Don’t let Facebook steal your marketing mojo. Build your own list! Use email and a newsletter to communicate the most important things and keep the networks in your back pocket to provide a behind-the-scenes fun and social look into your company.

Cheers!