At each new #Blogchat these days, it seems someone mentions yet another new social networking site I’d never heard of before.
I’m on Facebook and Twitter daily. I’m trying to increase my presence and interaction on Google+. I’m even trying to take more photos on Instagram. I’ve tried Pinterest. It’s not my cup of tea, but then from a demographic standpoint, I’m not exactly its cup of tea, either.
There are those who insist that you must be on all of these networks — and surely others — as much as possible if you really want your content shared and distributed.
The question I’ve not seen even one of these people ever answer, not once, should be the most obvious one:
When you spend so much time on social media, where are you supposed to find time to actually write for your website?
How much time, per day, per social site, is enough to get the amount of shares you need to take your blog to that promised land known as “the next level?”
And if you’re going to spend so much time networking with people on social media, is there any real point in maintaining a website that isn’t part of the networks themselves?
Take a deep breath and relax: I’m not about to abandon this blog. And you shouldn’t abandon yours, either. Especially if you own your own domain and are thereby in full control of your content.
Ivan Lutrov recently wrote about whether the never-ending army of social networking sites meant that business websites were no longer necessary. The answer he came up with is perfectly valid, and is in fact the same reason I moved my blog years ago from Blogger to a self-hosted site:
“You don’t actually own your account on Facebook, Twitter,Linkedin, or any other network. And you don’t actually own anything you post there. As soon as you create any content on these social networks, you also give up all rights to that content.”
One can get mired in a legalese quagmire over how much of your content you do or do not “own” on social networking. Some argue it’s not about ownership but licensing, and posting on those sites is a blanket license for the social media sites to use your content, though most of them are smart enough to insist that there are non-negotiable limits on how far they’d ever go with your content.
But the real point here is that if you do not own the domain on which your content primarily resides, someone else could always decide they don’t like you and just delete your account without any warning.
This blog began as a “journal” on AOL’s community. AOL deleted the content of a few people without any warning, according to those affected, then would not explain why entire journals were deleted following complaints about specific pieces of content. AOL also introduced banner ads on people’s journals without giving them the opportunity to opt out or to even select certain sponsors they’d allow or sponsors they did not want associated with their journals.
No one expected a business like AOL to operate as anything other than a business. But sometimes, when a business operates like a business without regard for its customers, that’s enough of a problem to make customers leave.
Facebook or Twitter or any of the others could pull a similar stunt on any of us tomorrow; it’s their respective sandboxes in which we are all playing. So we have to play by their rules, and we are subject to their whims, pleasant or otherwise.
When you have your own website on your own domain, you have more freedom to control what you do with what you own. That’s important, but it’s not really the most important aspect of it.
What’s more important is building community. If you control your content and are free to be more true to who you are, you have a better chance to build community. If your online presence isn’t left to the whim of some social media network’s terms of service, you have a better chance of maintaining a presence, which gives you a better chance to build community. And if you know you can be more true to yourself in a consistent way that you control, you have more confidence to build that community.
That’s worth having your own website for right there.
Totally agreed Patrick. Your blog or website, is also the one place you can brand as your own. A Facebook fan page still has the look and feel of Facebook. Same with all the other social networks. They're great places to go out and connect with the world, but you should develop your blog as your sandbox!
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Yes, I think that you still need a blog. On a blog you have serious visitors and better visitors than on social media.
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Patrick is a television producer, writer, Mac lover, and Christian, though not necessarily in that order. He has a natural dislike of double standards and poor grammar.
