Social Media Marketing: To What End?

I love this observation from a recent Jeff Bullas post:

“I’ve lived all three eras, and I have the scars. I started a blog in 2009 from pure human curiosity and built it to 33 million readers. Then Facebook throttled my reach. Then Google’s snippets answered the questions my articles used to. Then AI slop flooded the web I helped build.

Every wave, the machine took a little more of the human out of the middle. I’m not guessing at this pattern. I watched it happen to my own life’s work.

Look at your own history the same way. Every platform that ever gave you reach eventually took it back. Build the one thing they can’t throttle: a direct line to real people.”

When I tell business leaders that their most valuable asset is an email list, they often look at me like I’m crazy. Isn’t that a 1990s strategy? But your email list is the direct line to real people that Jeff is hinting at here.

As a marketing services provider, my main social media drug of choice has been LinkedIn. I’ve followed the rules, I’ve played the game. And I keep wondering, to what end? My valuable content enriches LinkedIn. The platform owns my contact list. Their algorithm shields me from the people who might need my ideas the most.

A lot of social media marketing has become like a trade show. You sit in a booth, make a snazzy sign to grab attention, and hope that a customer drifts by. Most people just want the swag, but you’re afraid not to participate because that would seem weird. Everybody else has a booth, right?

Likewise, I see people being pulled into the Instagram trap and the TikTok memes. It’s intoxicating. It might even be fun. There are certainly powerful use cases for social media marketing, but we need to keep asking the question, “To what end?”

Are you creating customers?

I appreciate you and the time you took out of your day to read this! You can find more articles like this from me on the top-rated {grow} blog. And while you’re there, check out my bestselling books on modern marketing, my speaking reel, and the world’s best personal branding class. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy of MidJourney