The Leased Land Problem: Expert Advice on Audience Ownership

Priscilla McKinney: Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, CEO and mama bird over here. Before we get going today, could you do me a little favor? It's getting your good deed of the day done already.

If you're enjoying the show, if you like hearing from the experts and my expertise, then can you please go give us a rating or review somewhere that you got this podcast so that other people can find us and we can continue to build this awesome audience.

We're almost at 450 episodes. So I think we might be doing something right. And I would really love if you would do that for me today. But today we're going to have a little come to Jesus moment about something that a lot of people don't want to hear about and want to start with a quick thought experiment.

What happens to your business if LinkedIn changes its algorithm tomorrow and your posts just stop being seen like overnight? Heaven forbid they decide to remove all of your company pages. What happens? And if your stomach did just a little flip, that's okay. That feeling is information.

It's exactly what we need to talk about today. And whether this is about a company page or a personal page, you need to be listening to this about social audiences, how you actually build them, and to really understand, you own that audience? And here's the uncomfortable truth. Most businesses are building on leased land and they don't even think about it.

Social media platforms are leased land. You do not own them. You do not own your audience there. You meet your audience there. And if you have been treating your followers and your follower count as a core business asset, let me assure you, we need to have a very honest conversation about your social media marketing strategy.

And this is something I care about deeply, especially in B2B digital marketing. Sales cycles are long and the stakes of getting your strategy wrong are genuinely high. So let's get into it. And I hope I can provide some value today.

Let me be clear. The basis of this conversation is that you do not own your followers on a social media platform. The platform does. You cannot email them directly. You can't control how or whether your content even reaches them.

I remember, what was it eight years ago, nine years ago when Facebook finally came out and admitted that even if they were a follower of yours, they were only getting your content 1% of the time. I mean, this was how they became a pay to play platform for businesses and LinkedIn followed suit. So the platform can change its rules at any time for any reason with zero notice. You are a guest in their house and frankly, sometimes the landlord is a bit temperamental.

So let me give you a sobering example that you've probably already forgotten about. Do you remember Google Plus? Some of you are already cringing. Some of you need to go look on your website and see that you still have the Google Plus logo there or in your email signature, please get rid of it.

But there were people who were absolutely crushing it on Google Plus. And I definitely was putting great stuff out on Google Plus and it was working for us. In fact, it was wildly successful. The value of all that success dead ended in 2019 when Google just shut it down. Done. Gone. No forwarding address, right?

All of that time, all that content, all of that audience building, there was no way for these people to go with you somewhere else. You couldn't take them. Now, hopefully you had an omnichannel strategy and you'd been working with people. Kind of my favorite thing to say is if you meet someone online, try and meet them offline. If you meet them offline, try and meet them online. And this is how you grow a database and grow a network that is meaningful.

Then there's the Facebook story that a lot of us live through in real time. Brands spent years building massive followings, hundreds of thousands of fans. One algorithm update later, the organic reach absolutely tanked. I remember when this happened and companies either had to pay to reach their own followers or start completely over somewhere else.

Now, back in that day, Little Bird Marketing had a lot more B2C customers and it mattered to us more. Now that really doesn't matter to us a whole lot, but if that same thing were to happen out on LinkedIn, which wait a minute, frankly, it happens all the time on LinkedIn. Maybe they hit you maybe less hard, but they hit you more often.

And here's what you need to understand. Platforms will always prioritize their own business model, ads, engagement over your goals. Please do not think that they are a social media platform. No, they are an advertising company. That is a fundamental misalignment of interest that is never going away. They want you to do things that will help them sell ads. That is the base of it.

So what works today will not work tomorrow if they need to do something different in order to sell more ads. So the mental shift I want you to take from this conversation is social media followers are borrowed attention. They are not owned assets. Say it with me. Borrowed attention, not owned assets. It might take you a minute to just kind of come back from that.

But let's talk about that exhausting hamster wheel that is chasing the algorithm, right? Nobody is living rent free on any of these social platforms. We're having to work for it. We're having to constantly change, right? All of a sudden LinkedIn favors carousels, carousels, and everyone starts making carousels and then they fall out of favor and then it works.

Then Instagram favors reels and everybody pivots over to reels and you know, Twitter now X favors threads and then everybody writes threads and then months later everything changes. Blah, blah, blah. You get the picture. And I had a client who spent an entire year mastering that Instagram algorithm. They built a system. They had strong growth. They had paid an outside consultant and boom, the algorithm changed overnight and the engagement dropped over 70%. 70.

That is to say you have to essentially start over building your audience. I get it. Algorithm chasing feels like momentum when it's working, it gives you those dopamine hits, right? I remember I had a post that went viral, almost a million views last year. But what am I going to do with a million views? That's not even something I should be chasing. I'm looking for meaningful connections. I'm looking for owning my audience.

So quit chasing those things, right? That kind of chasing is a full-time job that just constantly optimizes for the company's goals, the social media advertising company's goals and not your goals. You need to start optimizing for your goals. Are your leads going up? Is your revenue growing or are you really just good at making carousels?

Okay. Say that laughing because sometimes we have to laugh in order to cry and then change what we're doing, right? Because I understand you busy leaders need a marketing approach that is strategic and it's repeatable. And I know that if you're listening, then content marketing is a pressure that you feel every single day, right? The algorithm chasing is just not going to help us. It's reactive and reactive is not a good business model.

So Priscilla, what is the alternative? Well, we need to think about owned media and let's make sure that we are clear on what that means. Owned media means channels you control. Your email list you own it. You can export it and you can control who sees what and when.

Your website is your domain. It's your content. It has your rules. Your podcast could be delivered directly to your RSS feeds and it's not controlled by Apple or Spotify or any one thing. None of those channels answer to an algorithm. Okay, these are things that you own.

Now I'll give just a kind of a personal thought on this. A lot of people say to me about my podcast, Priscilla, why aren't you on YouTube? I could probably go on YouTube and I've thought about it a million times because there's such a virality to it. And they're so, there's a good discoverability and everything, but I have to say it still is not in alignment with my goals.

And you'll still find my podcast out in RSS feed. So you can get it where you like, but it was very important to me strategically that my podcast actually lives on my website, right? If people want to hear from me, they can come directly to my website and hear that. And if you want to hit me up at a conference and kind of pull me aside and ask me a little bit more about that strategy, it's pretty deep and it's based on data. But it just goes to show you that you need to be thinking about your strategy and not necessarily what everybody else is doing.

So why does this matter so much for B2B companies? Again, like I said, the sales cycle is long. It's months. I mean, some of them are 18 months, like well past a year. You need to know how to nurture relationships over time and you need to stay in front of people consistently. And social media can do that for you only to a point.

And it can't scale that for you, but email and owned content can. And that's where the real relationship happens because then you get a sense of not just their willingness to follow you, but their intent to buy from you. And those are two different things, my friend. We are not here to collect followers and be popular. Those are vanity metrics.

Yes, it's nice. I have 20,000 followers on LinkedIn. That says something about me and my content, but it does not say everything. My goal with posting amazing content to LinkedIn is to get people to finally come to my website where I can begin to own the relationship.

So think about the hierarchy of audience value. Email subscriber is worth more than a website visitor who is worth more than a podcast subscriber who is worth more than a social media follower. And I'm not saying social doesn't matter. It's an amazing way to connect and to reach. What I'm saying is that you control less and less the further down that list you go and control matters when you're trying to build a sustainable and really a predictable pipeline.

Which is how you build business people. We're here for business. This is not a nonprofit unless you're working for a nonprofit, in which case you still need money. So you need to think about your goals and what's going to be sustainable. What's going to drive a predictable pipeline.

So let me give you two stories to illustrate this. I had a brand come to me once that had gone viral on TikTok. I mean, millions of views, massive following, incredible reach, no email capture. No lead magnet, no call to action. They got a ton of attention, but no business impact. And when the trend that they were on faded, the opportunity was gone and there was nothing to fall back on.

Now, in contrast, I had another client that had a pretty modest social following, but they kept a large engaged email list and a consistent newsletter. Now, as I say newsletter, my eyes glaze over and I mean, some people know how to make them boring. So please don't say to people, subscribe to my newsletter. No, nobody wants to subscribe to your newsletter. But if you can call it something catchy and if you can provide real value, you'll never have to call it a newsletter again, right?

We do have one called Early Bird. The early bird catches the worm. And you know, we want to make sure that we are providing value to people and we are looking at those metrics to see when they perform and when they don't, right. But this client that I was working with, they had built real trust with their subscribers over time. And when social algorithms shift it did not affect their nurturing funnel. Their business kept growing because they owned their audience.

And they came to us and said we want to grow this even more. Can we use social to grow it? Yes, you can. Let's use social to grow it, but let's make sure that we're always bringing it back home, back home to owned audience, right?

And I don't want anyone to walk away from this episode and then go delete their social profiles, please. Social media again plays an important role in your strategy. You just need to understand what role it's playing and you need to reframe that role according to revenue generation and buying signals that are coming from people with intent.

Social media is a distribution channel. It is not the destination. Okay. Social posts should be like an appetizer, a little amuse-bouche, right? Your blog, your email list, your website, those are the main course. Every piece of social content should move people from the rented land, the leased land of whatever platform that you've created over to your owned channels.

Now, I will say kind of a funny thing. If you go out on Little Bird Marketing's LinkedIn company feed, you know, people comment, et cetera, but it kind of looks like we're lonely. But if I looked at that vanity metric and thought, doesn't have a lot of comments. We don't have a lot of people thumbs up or repost or blah, blah, blah. I might get the wrong idea and think I should cancel that feed. No, no, no, no.

I look over at my data and the reason why people are not engaging on LinkedIn with us is they are clicking through the link and getting to my website, downloading the thing, giving up their anonymity and giving me their email in order to nurture them, right. That is super important. And when you look at company LinkedIn feeds, they're going to need to be like that because nobody gets up and says, I wonder what Little Bird Marketing said.

No, they don't have a relationship like that with Little Bird Marketing. They might feel that. I hope so about Priscilla, but probably not that much. Nobody's getting up and saying that. Probably not even my mom, but I don't know. Maybe my mom, she is lovely. But you want people to follow your corporate feed, not necessarily because they're going to develop a relationship there, because they trust what they're hearing and they want to engage further.

So we need to build email capture into the content strategy. We need lead magnets, we need templates, checklists, guides, anything that is useful to your ideal client audience. That is the best place to start. Feature your offer to sign up for your helpful content very prominently. Give them an idea of what it would look like. Tease the idea out on social media.

Hey, all of our followers got this in the email this month. This handy checklist. Wouldn't you like to subscribe? So you need to understand their world. What's in it for them? And that's how we operate at Little Bird Marketing.

This is how we operate at Little Bird Marketing. Every post has a purpose beyond the platform itself. You might have a few in there that are fun and that are just genuinely trying to show our human side. But for the most part, what you see is it links back to a blog, a podcast episode, or a lead magnet. We're trying to build trust and then gain the relationship.

The goal is never LinkedIn virality. The goal is to grow our email list and drive consultations because we measure success through owned channels and actual revenue growth, not likes. Now, I had a client that had this conversation with me several years ago, and it was a deep conversation. We fought it out a little bit about some ideas, but in the end, they said, Priscilla, flip our strategy. We're in.

And so we shifted the focus from social engagement metrics to driving traffic to owned channels. And let me tell you, those social metrics, they went down and they had to have a lot of trust in me. But the leads and the revenue eventually went up because social engagement is not a business outcome. Conversions are. Revenue generation is.

So let me leave you with this. The brands that win the long-term game are not the ones who spend all the time cracking the algorithm, they are the ones who build something the algorithm can't touch. An audience that chooses them. A relationship that's nurtured over time and a channel they actually own. And that is the real competitive advantage in B2B marketing. And it's available to every single one of you that's listening right now.

If you're ready to stop borrowing attention and start building an audience that you own, head over to our website and check out our services. And specifically underneath the services, there's something that says content distribution. That is exactly the work we help companies get right. And if today's episode got your wheels turning, please share it with someone else who you think would benefit from it. From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.