I have lost count of how many people I have said this to over the years, but it’s in the hundreds.
The only things you can call your own are your website and your email list.
Repeat after me:
- You don’t own your audience.
- You don’t own your Facebook page, your Twitter handle, Instagram account, or your LinkedIn.
- NONE of it is yours.
ALL OF IT belongs to them, and their goals and motivations are NOT YOUR GOALS and motivations.
You want to use their platforms and the audience they grant you to grab attention, to land new clients, to build your business.
But they are concerned ONLY with maximising shareholder value.
Even if that comes at a cost to you, at a cost to usability, at a cost to the quality of their platform.
They don’t care. They have you by the short and curlies, they know it, and you are just gonna have to suck it up and keep coughing up, keep coughing up the content and keep paying out for advertising.
That’s why you pay far more now than ever before to advertise on Facebook, and that’s why pages that used to have enormous reach organically now HAVE TO spend hundreds just to get their posts seen BY THE USERS THAT ALREADY FOLLOW THEM.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the only things you own online are your website and your email list.
I went through this recently with a good friend of mine, over the holidays last year in fact.
It’s 8 pm and I’m having an amaro after dinner while in Sicily with my family.
My phone starts blowing up.
It’s my friend, in a blind panic, and his wife, also in a panic. Both are texting me because the unthinkable has happened.
“Your account has been suspended for violating community guidelines.”
- Years of content.
- Thousands of followers.
- Hundreds of Euro spent on advertising.
- Dozens of photos of completed projects.
All of it. Wiped out. Just like that.
The business my friend had carefully carved out for himself, all of a sudden, has no digital presence at all, no Facebook page, no portfolio of works, no way to get new leads, no easy way to be contacted, and nothing planned for the future except for whatever work had already been booked ahead.
Let me spell it out for you:
In 2025, building your entire business on social platforms is a sucker’s game.
Platforms will fail you.
Algorithms will betray you.
Accounts will vanish.
Not to mention that we have seen multi-hour outages of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp before, which will certainly happen again.
But email?
Email is untouchable.
Email is yours.
And it’s here to stay.
Everyone STILL USES EMAIL.
Sure, it might not have flashy carousel advertising and all that yadda yadda yadda, but guess where Facebook notifies you about a log in to your account, and what you need to get started setting up an account on X?
You guessed it – an email address.
So, while everyone else is gambling everything on social media, start quietly building your email marketing list. Get a website built, even if it’s just a one or two-pager.
You will ALWAYS own those two things, even if you get blocked and hounded from every other social network known to man.
Big things start from small beginnings, but make sure that those beginnings belong to you, completely and entirely owned by you, and that you don’t set yourself up in a position where some board of directors, McKinsey consultant, or tech billionaire can just yank the carpet out from underneath you and leave you out in the cold and your business with no digital home.
I’ve got your back on this because:
a) I know this stuff and I cut my teeth working in digital, 15+ years now, and,
b) I hate bullies, whether they’re right wing trolls, or millionaire tech execs who know, but don’t care that decisions like these affect people’s lives and livelihoods.
Get me in your corner. Contact me and let’s come out swinging.
