If you understand the history of sharecropping, it was an interesting arrangement. It looked advantageous to the sharecropper (getting to use land for no money up front), but generally ended in a very bad situation. It trapped farmers in a cycle of debt and poverty from which they often couldn’t escape.
Social media can be seen in largely the same way. From Seth Godin’s book “This is Marketing“:
“Facebook and other social platforms seem like a shortcut, because they make it apparently easy to reach new people. But the tradeoff is that you’re a sharecropper. It’s not your land. You don’t have permission to contact people; they do. You don’t own an asset; they do.“
Investing all of your time and effort into something that you don’t own can be a dangerous game to play, because all of your work could be taken away in a moment’s notice.
Granted, social media certainly has some major benefits (and some of you are likely reading this on a social media site), so I’m certainly not saying to avoid it entirely. In fact, we work with many of our clients to improve their content and help get more visibility (and traffic, and sales) as a result.
However, in every case we make sure that they own the stuff that really matters, primarily the website and the email list. Social media can be an amazing tool to drive traffic, but at the end of the day you always need to fully own the pieces that are the most important to you.
