Cory Doctorow lays down an obvious marketing rule for 2024:
“If there was ever a moment when the obvious, catastrophic, imminent risk of trusting Big Tech intermediaries to sit between you and your customers or audience, it was now. This is not the moment to be ‘social first.’ This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that you control….” (Here’s Cory’s blog post — just be aware the title of the post is Not Safe For Work.)
This applies to congregations, too. If you’re relying on Facebook as your central marketing strategy, that’s probably not a wise thing to do. Sure, it’s fine to use a Facebook account for marketing, but Cory’s point is that you really want to use that Facebook account to drive people to your own website. Which you control. So it cannot be censored, or walled off, or otherwise controlled by Big Tech.
I started ours this way almost 15 years ago, and it still is. The blog from the website posts to Facebook, Twitter, and, used to Google+. And we encourage people who prefer push to sign up for the emailed posts (or RSS, which is my preference). I’m currently webmaster (and president) of a watershed non-profit, and I revived the website and set it up the same way I had a hard time getting a couple of people who were posting to get used to it, and understand why, but we’re there now. It is a lot of work, as Doctorow points out, social media has consistently shut down automatic sharing across platforms. Posts from the WordPress blogs still post to FB pages, but not elsewhere.
Lisa, thanks for this confirmation of what Doctorow says.
FWIW — We’ve given up posting from our congregation’s WordPress site to Facebook, and just post the same thing both places ourselves. Facebook has taken away the ability to post from WordPress in the past, they can do it again whenever they feel like it, so no reason to trust them.