--- title: Own Your Content date: 2020-08-11T08:56:00-04:00 author: Sean Smith canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-11/own-your-content/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Season 03 Episode 11 – Aug 11, 2020 00:19:54 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Own Your Content  0:00 0:00 1.0x 0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-03/s03-e11-Own-Your-Content-master.mp3) In this episode, learn why having your own website is crucial for businesses in today's digital age, and how to leverage social media to promote it instead of replacing it. ### Show Notes - What are some benefits of having social media accounts at all? - What are some drawbacks of making social media accounts your primary Web presence? - Having your own website gives you full control over your content. - Don't be bound by social media algorithms. - Social networks are satellite sites, not your home planet. - Sharing content to social media sites. - Social networks make you look exactly like your competitors. - How people tend to find you online. - Social networks can limit your audience to members only. - Social networks come and go. Remember Myspace? ### Show Links - [Use social media to promote your website, not replace it.](https://belikewater.ca/blog/entry/social-media) - [Own Your Digital Content](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/own-your-digital-content/) - [What's The Best Home For Your Content?](https://www.thebusinessofauthority.com/episodes/what-s-the-best-home-for-your-content) Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi, and welcome back to the website 101 podcast. I'm Sean Smith your co-host and as usual, I have Mike Meller with me. Mike, how is your social isolation during COVID-19 going? **\[00:13\]** **Mike:** Yeah, hey, it's going okay. You know, we're dealing with it. It could be worse. It's worse for more people than it is for me and maybe better for some people than it is for me. I don't know, but we're We're getting by, it's fun. **\[00:26\]** **Sean:** Yeah, it sounds like me. Hopefully things pick up and we can reduce this soon, but it doesn't look like it's gonna happen anytime before the end of June or early July, in my opinion. **\[00:37\]** **Mike:** I'll tell you what, I hope that our listeners are learning the value of a good web presence in light of all this stuff, where it wants to do everything online, right? So it tells you, it should tell you how important it is to have a good website. Absolutely. **\[00:54\]** **Sean:** more than ever, right? And you know that that's very timely because our topic today is own your content. And what we're talking about here is there are a lot of really small solo-pronear type businesses that they think having a Facebook or Instagram or a Twitter or a Pinterest account is their website. And it may be working, but you need to do more than just have very social media accounts. You need to, as the title of the episode says, own your **\[01:35\]** **Mike:** content. Right. So, and we're going to get into the later all the benefits of having, you know, your own website rather than just having a presence on social media. But before we get into it, let's explore a little why because we do agree that you should have a presence on social media, almost certainly, right? You should probably have accounts on all these platforms or some of them. **\[01:58\]** **Sean:** Absolutely. Depending on your industry, you may or may not want to have Twitter, might be popular. Pinterest could be one. Pinterest or TikTok or whatever social media does you're is. You should be on it if it's important to your industry. For example, I'm on Twitter, I have a Facebook page, and I have a LinkedIn page. I don't have Instagram, I don't have Pinterest or TikTok or YouTube because those are not important to me in my industry. Maybe larger agency, it might be, and maybe in your industry having a Pinterest account is really important or TikTok or YouTube. You need to know your industry. **\[02:52\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and it's also your audience, right? I mean, if you are running a charity that has something to do with helping developing countries or something. Maybe TikTok is not quite your scene, but if you're running a charity that has something to do with helping younger people in Western nations where that audience tends to use that platform, maybe it does make sense to advertise on there. So yeah, audience, industry, all those factors would influence which social media platforms are appropriate for you. **\[03:26\]** **Sean:** Yeah and as an example of this, I have two kids. One is 18 and the other is 14. My 18-year-old barely uses Facebook and she just tells me that you know she uses it more than anybody and she's barely on there. It's for old people. Yeah and my son who's 14, he's like nobody uses Facebook and I made him get an account so that we could send him messages on on Facebook Messenger, but my point here is that if your target is teenagers, Facebook is not where they're hanging out. My daughter spends a lot of time on Instagram and TikTok and things like that, so if that's your audience, you need to go there. **\[04:13\]** **Mike:** Okay, so another thing I wanted to mention about social media platforms is that they have tools on them that you could leverage, right? So for example, Facebook, if you happen to be on that platform, it's really great for scheduling events. You know, if you have an audience that is part of your Facebook group or whatever and you have some event coming up, you can just create a new event and boom, people can like say, are they attending or not or maybe or whatever, and it's a really great way to sort of moderate that kind of thing. So sometimes they have tools like that or polls. Twitter has polls. You can create a poll to sort of survey your audience of that kind of thing. So that's another thing social media networks are good for. **\[04:58\]** **Sean:** Absolutely. So we've established that social media is important and that you should use it for your business. But the point of this episode is that social media should not be your website. Mike, why would you say that, or why would you agree with me that social media should not be your website? Why do you need an actual website? **\[05:24\]** **Mike:** Yeah, there's a few reasons I can think of. Okay, so I guess the main reason is, and it's what we've alluded to in the title of this episode, is that when you are running your own website, you have full control over the content you put up there. So if you consider, let's say, Twitter to be your main platform, you're, for example, bound by their character limit. It's two 40 now, 240 characters or something. **\[05:53\]** **Sean:** I can't. **\[05:54\]** **Mike:** I think it's 240. So, and then if you want to say more than that, you have to do these multi-post-tweet things and all this kind of stuff. You're limited by that kind of stuff, whereas if you have your own site, you get full control over what content you put on there. It can be as long as you want, or as short as you want. You know, there's no kind of rules you have to live by. Right. Hi, hope you're enjoying this episode. We're always looking for topic suggestions from listeners, so if there's anything you'd like us to discuss in the future, please let us know. **\[06:28\]** **Sean:** But there's also some risk involved in having your entire online presence owned by various social media accounts. Number one, you're unconnected. You may have the same username or or a similar username across all of these accounts, but there's no one central hub or location for people to come and find you. They can't go to widgetsincorporated.com because you don't have that. Instead, your widgets ink on Twitter, widgets incorporated on LinkedIn, widgets ink toronto on Facebook because somebody else already has widgets ink. So you're all over the place And there might be some inconsistencies with your name and people can't find you. Another issue that you could potentially run into is if your main social media platform changes the way they operate, it could negatively impact your business. Now a couple years ago, this was in the news a lot where Facebook had changed their algorithm And all kinds of groups and Facebook pages and company pages had lost a lot of visitors and interactivity due to this change. Now if that happens to you and all of your leads are coming from say Facebook or Instagram and they change the way the algorithm works for you and you're no longer or at the top, you're at the bottom. What can you do? Nobody's gonna find you. You're basically gonna go out of business. **\[08:32\]** **Mike:** Yeah, that's right. You're sort of bound by the operations of those platforms. Whatever they do, you and millions of other businesses on there just have to live with it. And yeah, that's a good point. And going back to your brand identity sort of issue earlier, that's another thing where you said you might have different user names across different platforms. Yeah, if you have your own site, you're also full control over your brand identity. So you can have the same imagery, the same name, well, it's the same because it's in one place. But basically you can sort of promote that as your identity to your audience, rather than know, well, we can't use, we're not allowed to use this particular image on a particular platform. So it's the here but not there, that kind of thing. So it's more centralized. **\[09:23\]** **Sean:** Exactly. And if you end up needing to use slightly different user names across various social media for whatever reason, at least in your profile, they're all going to include a link back to your company website. And that's where everybody can find it. Right. Now, Mike wrote an article a while ago. I don't know how long ago it is. And it's called use social media to promote your website, not replace it. And in his article, he talks about don't turn satellite sites into your home planet. And as I understand it, your social media is your satellite, and your website is your home planet. Mike, can you go on a little bit about that? **\[10:06\]** **Mike:** Yeah, that's right. And I think this goes back to what I said earlier about how it is important to be on social media just because of the reach that those platforms have. There's just so many people on those platforms that you probably, most businesses would be at a disadvantage if you don't leverage that. So it's important to have those presences, but what I recommend that you do is, you know, let's say you're promoting an event that you have going on. You could use those platforms to mention that you have it, but draw people back to your main site. Always work them back to your main site and say, learn more over at and then link to the page about it on your primary website. rather than having the entire set of details on Facebook or what have you. That is a whole bunch of advantages. At first of all, it promotes your main site. It also prevents you from having to update things in multiple places, right? If you have a single source of truth, as we call it, where people can learn all the details about the event, then if the event changes, you only have to change the detail on your main site. You don't have to go, oh, we have to go update LinkedIn and Twitter, because we mentioned all this here, and now that speaker is no longer appearing at our conference or whatever, right? **\[11:25\]** **Sean:** Right, and within the CMS of your website, you should be able to easily share content to whichever social media you want. So you could do a slightly manual way where you write your content, you grab the URL and you visit each of your social media pages and you share it. or you may be able to find a plug-in or add-on that lets you to automatically share. Now, a couple of months ago, I set this up with a craft site where the client writes a news article and then every time they publish that article, it gets automatically shared to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. That's great. They don't have to go and share it. It connects to the API and it's automatically shared. And you have the ability to edit the share image, the share text in the share title. So that is owning and controlling your content. So if you share this content on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever, if Facebook LinkedIn or Twitter changes their algorithm and you're no longer getting posted up to the the top of your search terms, at least your content is still there and then you can change your strategy or you can move to a new social platform and share that content like that. **\[12:53\]** **Mike:** Yeah, those platforms usually make it pretty easy for you to integrate them with any decent CMS that's powering your website. It's not, you know, the Facebook makes it a little bit better. Okay, yeah, that's true. Facebook might be one that does have invested interest in bringing you to their sort of world and making that your main thing. But I mean, if you want to look like everybody else, if you want to look exactly like your competitors on Facebook that then go ahead if you don't really care about having your own sort of graphic design identity and presenting your own personality for your site or whatever, then by all means go on Facebook and use that as your main site. But that's the trade-off, right? You're going to look like everybody else. **\[13:39\]** **Sean:** Well, we can also talk about Facebook because, basically, I feel like Facebook is probably the most popular site other than Google. I think so. And we alluded to this in another episode. If I'm searching for something, I don't go to Facebook and search for how to repair my dishwasher. I don't go to Facebook and search for it. I go to Google and search for it. And if you are a dishwasher repair company, that's where I'm going to find you. I'm not going to find you on Facebook. Facebook is still going to be good for you because some people might go on to Facebook and say, hey, anybody recommend a good local company to help me repair my dishwasher or whatever. And then people will say, hey, yeah, I worked with Bob at Bob's dishwasher repair shop. And then you'll call them. But if you don't do that, or nobody recommends it, what are you going to do? You're going to go to Google, you're going to search for it, and that's why you need your own website. **\[14:59\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and the truth is, as popular as some of these platforms are, not everyone is on there. You know, my wife doesn't have a Twitter account. I know a lot of my friends do not have Facebook accounts, you know, it's just the truth. So, if you can't log in to those platforms, in a lot of cases you can't reach the pages that are there. So, you know, just because you have your own identity up there doesn't mean that everyone's **\[15:24\]** **Sean:** going to be able to get it. And do you really want to exclude your content from a good portion of the world that doesn't use Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever social media platform or the day is? Probably not, it's not just not good business sense. **\[15:43\]** **Mike:** Right, and of the day is a good point because what if tomorrow people decide that Facebook is not very valuable anymore and you've spent years and years investing in your company on your Facebook platform, on your Facebook identity there, and all of a sudden, it's on a platform that people don't really value anymore. Why do that? **\[16:07\]** **Sean:** Yeah, just imagine if you had put all of your time into my space. Yeah, exactly, that's a good example. What are you doing on my space now? You're not. I mean, you need to be somewhere where, yeah, maybe Facebook dies or my space dies or whatever, But all of your content is on the web on your own domain, mycompany.com or whatever you want it to be. Now you can start sharing and pivoting to go on to the new hot social media place that is important for your industry and your business. Yeah. The web, if you have a website, all of your content should reside there because that's how people are gonna find you. there will always be search engines, whether it's Google or Duck Duck Go or whatever, as long as you're on the internet, people will find you. **\[17:05\]** **Mike:** Yeah, the idea of a website that you and I build has existed since day one of the worldwide web, but all these platforms have always come and gone. You mentioned MySpace. I remember there's a reference to MySpace in the first Iron Man movie. And that was a pretty cool movie. And it was like, popular and everything. And that was the thing that was going on at that time. And now it's like, what, my space? I don't even know if it's still, I guess it's still running, is it? **\[17:33\]** **Sean:** I think there was some celebrity who bought it and keeps it up on myspace.com. It still exists. And you can sign up and sign in. I don't know what, you can sign in with Facebook and Twitter. Perfect. I don't even know if this is the same thing, but I mean it still exists. It could just be somebody who bought it and old domain just to make money. I don't know. Well, there **\[18:05\]** **Mike:** you go. It was popular. It was the big thing of the day once and now it's not and you don't want to be tied up in something like that. Just use it as a way to reach your audience but always draw them back to your own site. **\[18:17\]** **Sean:** Right. And so I’d like to bring up one last thing. So I, like Mike, I wrote an article, mine’s a couple of years old now, called Own Your Digital Content. And this article talks a lot about the same kind of stuff that we talked about today. But last year, I updated the article to point to another podcast episode from the Business of Authority podcast. And the episode was titled, what’s the best home for your content? Now, I highly recommend listening to that. And I’m gonna include a link to both my article and the podcast episode in the show notes. But I really, really encourage you to listen to it because they were basically talking about the same thing. You need a website, don’t rely on social media. That’s cool. Use it. But social media should not be your prime location, right? Like Mike said, have your home planet and then have your satellites. Makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. My name’s Sean Smith, your co-host. And you can find me at my website, caffeinecreations.ca, on Twitter, caffeine creation, that’s spelled C-A-F-F-E-I-N-E-C-R-E-A-T-I-O-N. And also, I’m on LinkedIn, caffeine creations. **\[19:41\]** **Mike:** And I'm Mike Mele and you can find me online at blikewater.ca and I'm also on LinkedIn and Twitter. My username is Mike Mele. That's M-I-K-E-M-E-L-L-L-A. Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact). [![Listen on Google Play Music](/assets/images/google_podcasts_badge@2x.png)](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/itunes-badge.png)](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/spotify-logo.png)](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 03 - 1 [ Do You Really Need a Website](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-1/do-you-really-need-a-website/) - 2 [ Wordpress](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-2/wordpress/) - 3 [ How to Adapt During an Emergency: A Special Website 101 Podcast](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-3/adapting-during-an-emergency/) - 4 [ Video Marketing: Boosting Business with Video Content](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-4/using-video/) - 5 [ Vacations and Website Maintenance: Navigating the Challenges of Time Off](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-5/vacations/) - 6 [ There's a plugin for that](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-6/theres-a-plugin-for-that/) - 7 [ Backups: Why You Need Them and How to Implement Them](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-7/backups/) - 8 [ Using Custom Email Addresses: A Professional Touch for Your Business](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-8/email/) - 9 [ The Importance of Website Maintenance Plans and Retainers](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-9/maintenance-plans/) - 10 [ How to Conduct a Content Audit for Your Website](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-10/content-audits/) - 11 [ Own Your Content](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-11/own-your-content/) ### All Seasons - [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/) - [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/) - [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/) - [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/) - [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/) - [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/) - [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/) - [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/) - [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/) <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-END\]\]>