Your social media following isn’t the asset you think it is

Imagine your company has 50,000 followers on LinkedIn. You’ve spent years building that audience. You publish useful content. People follow you because they want to hear what you have to say. It feels like an asset because it is.

But what, exactly, do you own?

You own the content you create. You control your company’s LinkedIn account within the platform’s rules. But you don’t control whether those 50,000 followers see your next post. LinkedIn does.

Having access to an audience isn’t the same as having a direct relationship with it.

PESO is useful, but ask another question

Many marketers are familiar with the PESO model: paid, earned, shared, and owned media. Gini Dietrich introduced the model in 2014 as a way to think more holistically about how these different types of media work together.

Social media falls primarily into the shared category. Your website and blog are owned. Media coverage is earned. Advertising is paid.

It’s a useful framework. But I think marketers need to add another question: Who controls your access to the audience?

You can own your website and publish an article there. But if you depend on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, or another third-party platform to drive traffic to that article, you don’t control the connection between your content and the people you want to reach. The platform does.

We’ve seen what happens when platforms change

MySpace is an extreme example. At its peak, it was the dominant U.S. social network. Then its audience moved elsewhere. Brands that had spent years building followings there couldn’t take those followers with them.

Twitter/X offers a different lesson. After Elon Musk acquired the company in 2022, policies, features, and user behavior changed rapidly. Advertisers reconsidered their participation. Eventually, even the name changed. Brands didn’t control any of those decisions.

But it doesn’t take the decline of a dominant platform or a change in ownership to disrupt your access to an audience. An algorithm change will do.

What happens when you start from zero every time

A B2B company I previously worked with publishes strong thought-leadership content on its blog.

When a new article is published, there’s a concerted effort to promote it through social media. LinkedIn is the primary platform, with X and Instagram playing supporting roles. But traffic from those efforts isn’t what it once was.

The company has responded in part by bringing in outside industry experts as contributors — their names and networks help extend the reach of its content. It’s helped, but it hasn’t solved the underlying problem.

The company doesn’t have an email newsletter. It doesn’t do email marketing at all. This is a complex B2B sale that typically requires a salesperson, so prospects do receive emails from individual salespeople. But those are ad hoc, one-to-one communications.

What strikes me is that they’re essentially starting from zero with every new article. They work to get people to the content, but there’s no systematic next step for someone who likes what they find to say, “I’d like to hear more from you.”

When the next article publishes, the company has to go out and find an audience all over again.

We talked about email marketing. The concern is resources. Building an email program takes time and money, and both are limited. But the company is already investing resources in creating content and finding new ways to attract people to it.

What it’s not investing in is turning that attention into an ongoing relationship.

None of this means companies should abandon social media. Quite the opposite. One of the things I tell my Georgetown University digital marketing students is:

Be where your people are. Be useful when you get there.

Social media can be very good at providing a low-commitment way for someone to get to know you. They can watch a video, read a post, click through to an article, or follow you. They can engage with something you publish or simply lurk for six months.

That’s valuable. You’re earning their attention and, hopefully, their trust. But once someone has decided that what you provide is valuable, give them an opportunity to take the relationship further.

That might mean subscribing to a newsletter, registering for an event, downloading useful content, signing up for SMS, or creating an account. The specific next step will depend on your business and your audience. What matters is that you’re creating a way for someone to say, “Yes, I’d like to hear from you again.”

The objective isn’t to get people off social media. It’s to stop making social media the only way you can reach them.

But an email address isn’t an audience you own, either

Email changes the equation because it’s a direct route to the audience. You don’t need an algorithm to show your post, a publisher to cover you, or a search engine to surface your content.

But here’s where I want to be careful with the word “own.” Getting someone’s email address doesn’t mean you own the audience. They’ve given you permission to contact them, and that permission isn’t unlimited. It can also be withdrawn at any time.

Which brings us back to what marketers should actually be trying to build: relationships.

I tell my students that the email address isn’t the most valuable thing. The willingness of the person behind it to keep paying attention is. That’s the asset.

Social media can help you earn that attention. Email, SMS, and other direct channels can help you maintain it. But no channel gives you ownership of an audience. The relationship only lasts as long as you’re giving people a reason to continue it.

When you’ve built that relationship, the next time you have something worth saying, you don’t have to start from zero.

Author’s note: I developed the core argument and provided the client example and teaching materials that informed this article. I collaborated with ChatGPT to research and fact-check the historical examples, pressure-test and organize my thinking, and assist with outlining and drafting. I reviewed, revised, and approved the final article.

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