It’s Never Been More Important To Own Your Own Site

John Scalzi explains it so well:

“So, let’s go back to 1998. You’re a new writer and you want to establish a permanent residency online. Which would be wiser: Having your own site at your own domain, or putting up a site at GeoCities? It’s 2001, same drill: Which is wiser: Having your own domain, or creating a site on AOL servers?
2003: Your own domain, or a Friendster page?
2007: Your own domain, or a MySpace page?
(Hindsight is a useful thing.)
And now it’s 2011 and the choice is one’s own domain or a page on Facebook. Guess which I think you should do.”

Yet brands still continue to promote their facebook and twitter pages over their own domains. In every published media and commercial are vague hastags of company taglines. “Like Us On Facebook!” (BTW this is not a compelling call to action) messages are still predominantly shown over domain names.

Ever since Facebook launched EdgeRank it has become a very bad option in trying to keep customers looped in. Since Facebook wants you to be as engaged as possible whenever you visit, they use an algorithm to decide what would be the most relevant content for you to see. So it is not possible to reach people who have explicitly pressed “Like” to receive your updates, unless you want to pay Facebook for more reach.
Going forward you really can no longer make any claims or give incentives to people about receiving timely updates via facebook because you can only reach 10% – 15% of them with every post.  Dangerous Minds has written a very good post on why “putting a lot of energy into building a Facebook presence is a sucker’s game”.

These kinds of changes in social media that put more control in the hands of the company rather than in the hands of the user is a trend that isn’t about to slow down. Warren Ellis reports that the first cycle of social media is coming to an end:

“This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes.”

Your own site gives you credibility, control, analytics and the ability to collect information from visitors and choose how you want to communicate with them. Use social media as the spokes to which your personal site is the hub.

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