Imagine this…
You wake up, stretch, sneeze twice, open the dopamine fuelled sadness rectangle, and…
WHAM
Your precious Mega Titan Hustle Bro Facebook group (the one with seven figures worth of thumb sup zombies) has vanished.
Well I’d usually say this was a joke but it wasn’t.
And people are losing their shit.
I was going to go onto their posts and say “I told you so” but they know better.
Imagine having your main source of income, clients and customers disappear with with a snap of the fingers?
No warning. No polite breakup text. Just a 404 where your clout used to be.
Cause of death: Zuck sneezed. (Probably) or the fact that he has had enough of 3rd party automation tools ruin the platform, on top of people abusing it for what it really was meant for in the beginning.
People are getting an inbox full of “This content violated our Community Guidelines” auto emails and I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner if I’m honest.
They built a castle on a sandbar made of other people’s rules.
They kept telling themselves stupid shit like, “It’s free real estate!”, “Look at all these hearts and lol emojis!” and “Backups? Pfft…I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Except tomorrow is now a smoking crater where your audience used to hang their dopamine IV drips.
And as boring as things sound. Email lists are the cockroach of the marketing world. In a good was that is.
It’s portable. Zip it up, shove it on three hard drives or 32 different cloud based backup services.
It’s permission based magic. They asked you to invade their inbox. Which is basically a blood oath in internet terms.
No algorithmic overlord throttling your megaphone. Gmail might nudge you into Promotions tab, but at least it doesn’t vaporise you mid sentence. Plus if your emails are entertaining and worth reading. People will look for you and drag you right back out of the promo tab.
It’s still to this day, monetisation steroids. Open rate > reach rate. Cash doesn’t care how many little blue thumbs you had… It cares how many actual eyeballs read the pitch or whatever.
Nerds on Facebook: “But my engagement was through the roof!”
Cool story, Pumpkin Spice. So was the Hindenburg’s altitude and look what happened to that big ol’ blimp?
Grow your list. Back up your list and rinse and repeat. It’s pretty damn easy.
Stephen Walker