Being Digitally Anti-Fragile Part 2
Stop giving away your audience to big platforms.
This is part 2 in a 3 part series on how to create a antifragile digital presence. Part 1 focused on diversifying your presence. Today we will discuss how to own your on audience.
Own Your Audience
Imagine you are on the wrong end of some mistaken policy enforcement from Google or Facebook or some other behemoth. Your account is blocked. You loose access to your customers. Just like that.
The best way to fortify against this is to:
Take as much of your audience to different platforms as you can.
Create a direct channel to your audience.
Portability
Any wealth manager worth their salt will tell you to invest in a lot of different types of assets. Same is true for your digital presence. Some tips on this:
Cross promote your content across platforms. Post links to your Youtube videos on your Instagram profile, link your Facebook stories to your Snapchat.
Give incentives to your audience for following you on different platforms.
The incentives can be anything. From exclusive discount codes, to exclusive content. You can also create incentives to follow you on multiple platforms.
Turn your ecommerce store into a mobile app and own your audience click the button to get on the waitlist.
Direct Channel
Right now there are two mainstream digital channels that are still fairly independent:
Email
SMS
I understand to a whole generation these technologies may as well be in the same league as the abacus and the horse-car. Maybe your audience is in that niche. However, this is myopic. Email still has better marketing return than social and search ads. At least for now.
Give incentives to your audience to sign up for email and text updates. Creating a direct channel frees you from the petty nature of big platform policy response. There are many resources. If you want something simple you can use Twitter's Revue, ConvertKit, or like us, Substack. There are also commercial services, like HubSpot, MailChimp and SendGrid. All of these allow you to own the mailing lists. Which means you can move to different service whenever you want. The field for reliable SMS services is limited but, Twilio seems to be a great option.
By owning your audience, you can protect your business or brand from egregious policy enforcements and surprise outages. Not only can you continue business as usual, you can also setup emergency lines as well.
This is part 2 of a 3-part series on creating an anti-fragile digital presence. Part 1 is here. And part 3 are coming soon. MakThis allows ecommerce businesses expand their platform, by turning their websites into fast, performant apps for iPhone and Android. If you have store that uses Shopify or BigCommerce, you can get on the waitlist here.