Market Your Website, Not Your Socials

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket”. Well, today’s lesson is about not putting 100% of your time, effort, and energy into your social media profiles while neglecting your website. Much like the hypothetical basket of eggs, you could lose your social media accounts. If that’s all you have, it would wipe out all of your hard work in an instant, almost like it never happened at all.

I barely did anything on facebook today. I shared a few of my clients’ posts to my other pages. I also shared a “Save the Library” event to a few pages. I heart reacted a bunch of posts with various business pages I admin. And then I walked away for a while to do some chores.

When I came back, I switched back into my personal profile, and tried to heart react a post on my client’s page. It’s technically “my” page as far as facebook knows, since I manage it. They restricted me for this.

This restriction happens to me almost every single day at some point. I can report 20 spam comments per day, and the spam rarely gets deleted. The spam accounts rarely get removed. There’s even a spam forex review for my business that I’ve been reporting every month since 2021. They never remove the spam review, and I’m not allowed to delete it. But I am constantly restricted from performing the most basic actions on my own business pages, when I’ve done nothing wrong.

This is why I tell people all the time that you need to promote your website in other places than just social media. Facebook, as a platform, just gets more and more restrictive every day. All of them do. They’re afraid of being sued for user posted content ever since section 230 was compromised by the Unconstitutional FOSTA-SESTA Internet Censorship Law in 2018. Section 230 has often been called “The 26 words that made the Internet”. In 2018, FOSTA-SESTA broke Section 230, and the Internet. So now the social media giants censor everything, in fear of being sued. Section 230 allowed the Internet to grow and flourish. Undermining Section 230 has been nothing but a disaster for adults trying to exercise freedom of speech online.

They equally don’t want you to promote your business too much for free, because they want you to sell on marketplace and give them a cut of the profits, and/or pay for advertising. So they restrict users who perform too many free actions on business pages.

And those pesky spam comments that rarely get removed? That generates a LOT of traffic and clicks, which translates into a lot of advertising $ in their pockets.

Meanwhile, I’ve been banned from Facebook Advertising since 2019 for no reason that makes any sense.

Almost every day this same restriction happens to me while I’m trying to perform marketing tasks for the 60+ business pages I admin. It’s a nuisance, but also, a good reminder.

You need to build up your own website so that you always have a platform that belongs to you, which won’t vanish overnight, no matter what happens with social media. Facebook and the rest of them could ban you for no reason. Or, they could disappear tomorrow for any reason. Either way, you would lose all of the backlinks and marketing time you put into it.

Make sure you’re putting as much time into marketing your website as you are your facebook page, twitter profile, instagram, and etc.

These 3rd party platforms will restrict you randomly for no reason, with no warning, and even remove your account if you have too many restrictions, so make sure it’s not your only marketing platform. It’s a good idea to have a profile on all the social media sites, with backlinks to your website. But remember that they could all vanish at any time. And plan accordingly.