A compelling example of how changes in social media platforms can impact businesses comes from recent developments where social networks have deprioritized certain types of content, notably news.
This shift has significantly affected publishers’ ability to drive traffic from social media, leading to a noticeable decline in visibility and engagement for many.
For instance, data from Chartbeat shows that in 2023, aggregate traffic from Facebook to news and media properties declined by 48%, with traffic from X (formerly Twitter) down 27%.
This trend underscores the volatile nature of relying on social media platforms for business stability. Without warning, their algorithm changes can drastically alter the digital landscape, impacting visibility and engagement.
Such shifts suggest diversifying digital strategies to include more digital sovereignty, like a dedicated website.
Businesses often lean heavily on social media marketing due to its broad reach, targeting capabilities, and relatively low costs compared to traditional media.
However, overreliance on social media platforms can pose several risks and challenges:
Businesses are at the mercy of platform policies and algorithms. Changes in the algorithm can drastically reduce visibility, affecting traffic and, ultimately, sales. Policies regarding content can also change without notice, leading to suspended accounts or removed content.
Social media platforms can experience outages, preventing a business from accessing its audience. These events can be detrimental during product launches or important announcements.
While social media allows for brand expression, the platforms dictate the layout, what content gets seen, and how interactions happen. This can limit how a brand presents itself online.
Platforms often control the data, not the businesses. Changes in privacy laws or breaches can impact how businesses interact with their audience, sometimes resulting in loss of customer trust.
Social media’s audience is spread across various platforms, and demographic shifts can affect where and how a target audience can be reached. As new platforms become popular, maintaining a presence on multiple platforms can become resource-intensive.
As more businesses turn to social media, advertising costs rise due to increased competition for limited ad space. This can reduce the return on investment for smaller companies or new entrants.
The personalized nature of social media content can mean that businesses mostly reach users who already know about them or are similar to their current customers, potentially limiting new market reach.
Social media can amplify negative feedback or incidents, sometimes spiraling into public relations crises quickly. Managing these requires constant vigilance and can divert resources from other business operations.
Instead, we recommend a diversified approach to online presence—including a robust website and other digital assets—to mitigate the risks associated with overreliance on social media. This strategy gives you stability, control, and a consistent connection with your audience.
Your social media profiles may be blowing up with user engagement, likes, shares, and comments. Still, your profile belongs to either Meta, TikTok, X, or whomever ultimately owns the platform you’re doing so well on.
That means platform outages can disrupt it, change the algorithms, censor posts, suspend the account, and cause attacks by competitors filing bogus complaints about your content.
We’ve seen it all, especially insidious in regulated industries.
Contrastingly, your website is your exclusive property. It’s a digital space you own and control, providing you with the stability and security that ‘rented space’ on social media platforms cannot guarantee.
Enhancing your online footprint is more crucial than ever as we enter 2024. Two pivotal areas, website content, and accessibility, are at the forefront of our strategic focus.
These elements are not just about staying current; they are about setting the stage for future-proof digital dominance.
Here’s how honing in on high-quality, informative content and ensuring your website is accessible to all can transform your business outlook.
Good, informative, and engaging website content is under fire right now, both from AI, which is doing a terrible job of creating it, and from Google, which is punishing sites for failing to follow the false promises of using AI-driven content.
Making your website accessible to everyone without compromising the design that you or your designer worked so hard on is currently the sleeper hit of 2024.
Savvy companies are doing this because they know how large and loyal the population of those who need web accessibility tools is and how much they value companies that care enough to install such tech on their site.
What brought us to this resolution in 2024?
More on that in future blogs and our insider newsletter.
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