How to Truly Own Your Content
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Have you ever heard of SixDegrees? Friendster? Orkut? These social media platforms were once popular places to connect with real-world friends, family, and acquaintances. Over time, they closed down, giving way to new social media options. If you had asked anyone who used them, they probably wouldn’t have imagined the shutdown of these platforms. What if that happened with Facebook or Twitter? Orkut’s story can tell us.
Orkut was a social networking platform similar to Facebook. It was originally designed to connect people to friends, coworkers, neighbors, and more by joining communities they were a part of. Users could also recommend products and services to their connections and even rate the people in their communities. It was wildly popular among techies in Brazil, a place that values brand advocating by video. In the end, Orkut’s popularity went downhill due to the limited video functionality on the platform, prompting users to find a social media site more compatible with their needs. It was eventually purchased by Google, becoming Google+. However, Google struggled to regain and sustain the site’s popularity, and eventually, Google+ shut down for non-enterprise users, rebranding itself once again as Currents.
Plenty of businesses used Orkut and Google+ because it gave customers ways to engage with them and recommend their products or services. When users of Orkut abandoned the platform, they effectively gave up all the content they created that lived on the site. For those who stayed, some content may not have transferred over when the site was rebranded as Google+. And for the businesses who got to stay on in Currents, they would’ve lost all their customers’ content, reviews, and interactions plus some of their own content because some features were no longer supported. For creators, this is a worst-case scenario, but the fallout can be avoided.
As an author, whether you self-publish or traditionally publish, you’re essentially a small business. Unlike many small businesses, though, you probably don’t have an assistant, a web developer, or a PR firm unless you’re one of the publishing elites or your wealthy spouse has recently died under mysterious circumstances. You probably need to maximize your time and effort, and you need to protect the content you create so it can continue to showcase your talents. That’s why it’s imperative to develop a website for your brand and use a social media content calendar like Mahoney and Tang suggest in their book about social media use.
When you have a website, you can share your blog content over social media where and when it makes the most sense, allowing you to save time by reusing content. For instance, if you write lots of blog posts, sites like Facebook and Twitter are great places to showcase that material. If you’ve made promotional videos, you share them from your website to YouTube or Vimeo. You can share smaller pieces of those videos on TikTok. If you’ve recently had a brand photoshoot done, you can display those images on your website, and share them on sites like Instagram and Pinterest. By keeping all your content on your website, you’re making sure it will survive the ups and downs of social media platforms while driving traffic to your site from social media.
Combining all these efforts with a social media content calendar can help further save you time by eliminating the urge to be on all social media platforms at all times. When you use a content calendar for social media, you plan certain bits of content in advance so you won’t miss major opportunities while you’re working on projects. You can pre-plan certain content pieces to be released on certain days, such as holidays or just before the release of a new novel. Scheduling social media posts well in advance allows you to better contain your social media usage. You could plan to do your scheduled posts on the same day each week or month, then spend a shorter amount of time daily to respond to those who engage with it. That way, you’re controlling your social media experience rather than allowing your social media to control you. You’re also truly owning your content because it will originate from your personal online space.
