What do you want your social media to do for you?

Is your social media goal to get a bunch of Facebook fans or Twitter followers? Do you have links to your social media sites at the top of every email that goes out and every page on your website? Are you putting all of your efforts into building your social media

If this sounds like you – STOP.

You’re number one priority, online at least, should be getting emails on your email list. No matter what changes Facebook, Google or any other internet superpower decide to make to their algorithm, the one thing they can not take from you is your email list. SEO, Facebook fans, etc. are just tools to gather more emails for you list. They are NOT the holy grail of marketing.

Let me explain. There’s always someone out there telling you their SEO tactics will bring in more visitors to your site than ever before. And that may be true. But – are they the right visitors? Are they visitors who need the solution you’re offering, want what you’re selling, and can afford it? What if they are? What if you spend years perfecting that SEO, people are visiting your site in droves and buying all the cruises you can book and then one day – Google catches on to your tricks and changes it’s whole algorithm. Now a site with <<insert scammy SEO tactic here>> is blacklisted from Google and won’t show up in any Google search. Now you’re income stream is gone and you’re out of business.

Or, let’s say you were way ahead of the game and built a following of 100,000 fans on Facebook. Then one day Facebook changed the algorithm so only 5% of your fans see your posts. They’re fans. They liked your page. They want to see your posts. But Facebook has decided that they want businesses to pay if they want all of their fans to see a post. There goes your business.

These are things that have really happened. Businesses that relied on traffic from Google literally saw their traffic drop to almost nothing overnight when Google decided to change the rules. And companies that built massive followings on Facebook are now frustrated that their fans won’t see their posts if they don’t pay Facebook a fee per post.

Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter – you don’t own your space there. You are renting it. They can change the rules and even take it all away overnight if they want to.

Your website and your email list are yours. You own them. No one can take them away. Everything you do online should be ultimately feeding into them.

Social media sites are useful but not as the final destination for your fans or clients. They’re tools you can use to find your ideal clients.

You can compare them to a newspaper. You place an ad every week and 10 people call you to book a cruise. You’ve done this for years and you’re making millions. (OK, hundreds of thousands) Then one week you call to submit your latest ad and no one answers – the newspaper is out of business. You’ve been sending all of these clients on cruises but you don’t have any way to reach them now. You didn’t save their phone number in your data base so you have no way of contacting them and unless they saved your number somewhere, they won’t know how to find you now, either.

Seems rediculous, right? There’s no way a travel agent wouldn’t have saved their clients’ details in a database.