The best indicator of a strong audience is not how many social media followers you have, but how much direct traffic is received on properties you actually own.
Publishers have given too much power to properties they don’t own. Yes, search engine and social media platforms have interwoven themselves into the fabric of audience building. They are indispensable tools for distributing content. However, they still are simply websites that belong to others, and they are making money off content you painstakingly created and allowed to be distributed through their channels.
Those websites have no value without content created by publishers, whether its a multi-sourced news article or a picture of your vacation to Barbados. They make their billions by leveraging the content that you provide. It makes me cringe a little when publishers say they want to be wherever their readers go for information. In other words, they want to place their content on properties that they don’t own and thus lose serious leverage. I don’t see wisdom in bending to every whim of content curators, spending resources on developing your platform so it can more easily be exploited by someone else’s.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for search engines and social media. If used well, they provide wonderful pathways to your properties. Good search engine and social media optimization practices are excellent ways to present your content to a wider audience. However, it doesn’t completely become your audience until it comes by way of direct traffic. Put yourself in the user’s shoes. What user is truly your audience member? The one who happened upon your article through a social media feed or the one who knows you well enough to type your URL into the browser or tap on your app?
The latter knows who you are and values the work you are doing. The former is casually interested.
As you look to build an audience, continually ask, “Is what I’m doing encouraging direct traffic growth?” Create content that will make users want to be on your email list and on your browser and app notifications. Make your platform influential enough that users will remember your brand and URL and come back to you often, directly. Leverage search engine and social media as free advertising for you and not simply free advertising dollars for them.
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