Using Social Media Without An Email List is Like Building A House With Nails But No Hammer

When you start using social media, you’ll find that it becomes part of your marketing ecosystem. Nothing you do to promote your business needs to operate in a vacuum. Ten years ago, you’d take out an ad in a magazine and there is would sit, alone and unmeasurable, with no push from your other marketing and no pull back to anywhere else.

Today, you are building a community on social media and it never stands alone. Links to your Facebook page, your tweets or your blog from your newsletter or website send traffic and links from social media to your website or YouTube videos. It’s a bustling network where the energy from one platform drives the others. Keep any one post or tweet as interesting and useful as possible and you keep the traffic moving.

I’ve found that developing an email list is critical to the process. No, your newsletter is not social media. But it is an important that you have an email list as part of your program. Businesses can not exist on social media alone. For one thing, you don’t own your Twitter content or Facebook list. If these disappear or change in some significant way, you may be out of luck. Your email newsletter list is your own. You have whatever information your readers have chosen to give you and that database stays with you.

Develop fascinating, interesting, helpful content for your newsletters, get people to choose to sign up, and you will find that your email newsletter could be the cornerstone of your marketing efforts, driving traffic to social media, building your brand and, yes, selling your product. Eventually, you will be looking at the statistics for traffic to your social media platforms and see that email is the prime driver and the spikes of traffic and conversation always occur on the days when the email arrives in their inbox.

It’s important that our infatuation with social media not lead us to forget about the fact that their is power in the non-social aspects of your marketing efforts and that email can’t be abandoned when you start spending your energy on social media. It will be more important than ever.