As a creator, you spend much of your time trying to grow your audience, connect with your audience, and find better ways to serve your audience. There’s so much time and effort put into growing a social media following, and every creator wants it to pay off. However, having a social media following doesn’t guarantee it will. When your audience is solely on social media, you don’t own your audience.

Having a huge or loyal following on social media may benefit you in building trust, engagement, and brand partnerships, but you’re essentially just renting that audience. When you don’t own your audience, you put all of your hard work at risk. With just the click of a button, your entire profile and social media existence can be wiped away. When you own your audience, you don’t have to worry about that. This blog post will discuss why it’s important to own your audience and give tips on owning yours.

Why it’s important to own your audience

Let’s say you have 10,000 followers on Instagram, but you’re not sharing content that incentivizes your audience to connect with you beyond social media; you’re simply renting your audience. If Instagram decided to shut down tomorrow, delete your account, or make changes to its terms that don’t benefit you, then all the hard work you’ve put into building your audience goes to waste. When it comes to owning your audience, you need to take advantage of first-party data, information that a company collects from its customer. This can be name, e-mail address, phone number, or other pertinent information. Here’s how creators can benefit from having this type of information.

Benefits of owning your audience

It saves your business if a social media platform shuts down, your account is deleted, or algorithms change. Because social media is always changing and we have no control over it, by owning your audience, you are saving yourself from a lot of headaches and loss of income by not solely relying on social media.

You’ll learn more about your audience. When you have more information on your audience, you can figure out how to better serve them.

You can build a solid personal brand. When you focus on building your personal brand outside social media, you offer your audience a better brand experience, resulting in a more loyal following.

Tips for owning your audience

So, what’s the best way to own your audience outside social media platforms? Here are a few tips on how you can own your audience:

  • Build an e-mail list. Building an e-mail list is the best way to stay in touch with your audience outside social media. Some of the best e-mail marketing platforms that can help you do this are Mailchimp, AWeber, and Convertkit. You can send out newsletters to keep your audience up-to-date, share what’s new, and offer exclusive content. If social media shut down tomorrow, you’d still have your e-mail list.
  • Take advantage of mobile marketing. This has the same benefits as building an e-mail list, except you’ll have your audience’s mobile phone number and can text them anytime. Some of the best platforms to use to get started with mobile marketing are SlickText and SendinBlue.
  • Offer unique experiences. Create more intimate and unique ways for your audience to connect with you. Think community events, workshops, live streams, consultations, meet-ups, etc. Offering these types of things makes your community feel much closer to you, and they become loyal. When you build a loyal community, these people will follow you regardless of where/if you’re hanging out online.

So, what steps are you going to take so that you can have more control over your audience? Leave a comment below!