Let’s face it! If you place your content, efforts, investment on someone else property you’re giving away much more than control over your data, but above all, all your investment and sweat. In a matter of seconds, you could lose everything you’ve been working for months or even years, since you don’t actually own that digital location or your brand digital hub.

This happens today, every single day and examples keep popping out as an alert to everyone. Businesses were building, investing millions and efforts into creating content into other platforms since that’s where their customers were.

At first, it makes sense, right? If our customers are using these platforms, we should build on it and get the awareness and presence required to reach them. However, when these platforms reach a momentum and have a ton of content that you worked so much to create, they change the rules, and now you need to keep paying to be present to those that actually followed you in the first place.

How Businesses Are Becoming Aware of Brand Digital Hub

That’s why so many businesses are changing their minds and closing their pages on some spaces and creating on others since it’s more interesting from a revenue standpoint.

See this example from Microsoft Europe that quite recently closed their Facebook Page and alerted their followers that they’ll be more active on Twitter.

This doesn’t mean that it’s better to keep investing in another platform that could backfire again, but at least it works for them for now. However, they keep centralizing their content and media into their own digital presence which is their site.

Your Site is something that you own. That you control from top to bottom and you make your rules. Not being a hostage of other agendas. This is happening for some time now, but businesses are not learning from these experiences.

Twitter was one of the first Social Platforms to change their rules, and from one day to another they’ve closed their API’s and businesses and startups that were built to use it like Seesmic and so many others needed to change their business model since then. Most of them have closed forever.

Now, it’s LinkedIn that’s changing their API usage, and some developers are reaping their hair out in frustration. Some of these examples are mostly about developers and API access, but the same thing happens with Platforms that you don’t own or control. Facebook was a great way to reach your fans and engage your brands and businesses with actual clients in ways that some considered way too difficult. However, such a platform’s popularity and the real need to make some adjustments on how to show their feeds have resulted in an algorithm change. And then, you needed to pay as any other media to reach the followers you invested too much to get.

It’s only fair to pay to use a media channel to use it and reach them out if you think about it. However, it’s a little awkward that they use your content to get their users happy as well, and they don’t pay you for it.

Brands like Copyblogger, Eat24 and a few others have closed their Facebook pages for different reasons, but everything comes down to this: it was not profitable for them. One can argue that they didn’t use it the right way to get revenue, but they were building and investing in a “landlord house” at the end of the day. When they decide to change the rules, they will.

Right a few days ago, Pinterest just wiped out a huge community of Power Users by killing all affiliate links. Just think about it. You were building a huge fan or follower list to your Pinterest Boards inserting content every single day to keep building it, and from one day to another, all of the links from which they collected a commission were obliterated. How would you feel about it? But they’re on their own right to do so. It’s a Business. It’s not your Business.

What Can You Do About It?

Well, you can start to invest and build your own platform. Wait, it’s not a social platform as you know it. It’s your own digital real estate where you own your content, your brand, your guidelines and everything about it.

If you recall a few years ago, before the big hype behind Facebook, Twitter, and so many others, your central location was your own domain name, IP, and site. And then, you’ve built subdomains, microsites, campaigns and everything evolved around your central digital Hub. These platforms came along, and they sold you the idea that you needed to build on their own controlled environment because your audience was there. It made sense in a way, but get this; you’ve lost your freedom to do things as you wanted to do it. Building your site and make everything around it doesn’t mean a return to the ancient internet lame way to do things… – thing.

It’s to gain your control again over your brand and communication and use the rest of the platforms, profiles, channels, media and so on to what they’re for in the first place. Yes, it would be best if you made things different from 2004. It’s not a time to keep flushing content and advertising on your customers’ throats as you once would do. It’s different, and you need to respect your audience by providing value. But you can do it in your own space, not in others.

Are you ready to fight for your Brand again on your own terms and build your Space? If so, then check our solutions and give us a try. After taking this step, you will be amazed at how much you’re going to achieve and concentrate on getting the revenue you always searched for.