Jon: Have you heard of it?… Platform blah-blah-bleh is changing their algorithm.
Mary: NO! Not again, what about all our strategies and ready-made content, and all this… hashtags!
Jon: No I’m afraid that’s gone we should relearn this.
Mary: Omg, that’s going to hurt our marketing…
We’ve all had or heard these conversations by now. This moment when the platform you’ve relied upon does that one thing that could hurt your efforts. Welcome to ground zero again, how do you feel?
But if we revert the narrative we can all get to understand it. Every platform is a business, we know that. Every business will do whatever it can to maximize profit (sometimes). So it’s probable that those actions come in direct opposition to the way we are using the product. In your own businesses, even though you want to service your clients in the best way possible, is never to the detriment of the business (or at least we try not to).
So, what do we do about this? Here's where the other part of the title comes into play. You own a platform. One designed for your business and for your customers. A corner of the internet where everything is about servicing your audience with what they want. Does this mean you focus only on that and leave the public platforms? NO! This is about offering a place of reference vs being solely in the public billboard avenue that sometimes is social media.
With that, content marketing becomes a packaging decision, not a cat and mouse game. “ we vs the current algorithm” becomes “us for the current algorithm”.
What are examples of owning a platform? Well, even hosting your blog, putting all those videos and pictures in a central place on your own website. And in the most notorious of cases following the lead of Nike, lego, and others. That have created full-on platform experiences. For the delight of their audience, they created apps and content hubs that transformed the regular customer into a fan of what they mean not only what they sell. The brands that take this approach will see their growth being immune to the change that social media platforms force into the rest.
In a nutshell. If you supply X for your customers, it is a very good idea to also become the magazine that talks about the greatness of X and best uses for it. Social media is a great place for that but the one place where you rule it’s your own hub.
Change the conversation in your organization from the one in the beginning to one like:
Jon: Have you heard of it?… Platform blah-blah-bleh is changing their algorithm.
Mary: We can repurpose pieces of all this content to accommodate the changes and keep the traffic to our central hub.