People are often mislead to think that the number of facebook fans they have will be the most influential type of "follower-list" to our bottom line. You aren't really told the inevitable truth about facebook fans, twitter followers, and instagram followers.

The truth is that you have very little control in the way you can interact with your social fans and followers.

People who make money off of getting you semi-qualified facebook fans will not tell you that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can decide, at any moment, to change how many of your fans & followers see your posts.

Remember when Facebook changed how many people saw your posts a couple of years ago? They made you have to pay (per post) to have more than 2.5% of your fans see your posts? You're still doing it today if you're using Facebook to market.

Google changes their search algorithm a couple of times a year, leaving people scrambling when their traffic and income dip quickly. All of a sudden your new car is not as easy to pay off.

A friend of mine went from online clothing guru to temp worker from one of these. That's not an embellishment.

Do you want to know the marketable follower-list that you control the most?

It's your email list. Duh.

News about marketing trends can saturate the airways and sway people's understanding of things. So when you're just scratching the surface of marketing tactics and news, the trending topics stand out the most. They can seem like the obvious answers to your marketing woes. Social media marketing is fantastic for branding, but it's not what it used to be. Nowadays, and probably forever, this fact should help guide you.

First for some simple math...

• About 2-5% of your facebook fans will see a post that you create.
• On the other hand, about 18-30% of your emails will be opened.

That's at least 10x the view-rate.

Here are some more useful facts.

• The wonderful thing about your email is that there are NO distractions there.
• On facebook there are notifications popping up, a sidebar full of Ads yelling at them, and an ENDLESS feed of distractions above and below your post.

So if you have an email list of 250 dedicated fans, and you have 1,000 people on your facebook page, one email would be seen by the same amount of people as your facebook post. That's as long as you aren't paying to boost the post. Once you get someone on your email list, you don't have to pay to have them see it.

Facebook changed their algorithm some time ago, and a lot of people are now stuck paying to reach the fans that they already worked so hard to get. Instead of dealing with this, why not just build your email list?

P.S. I am not saying that followers on social media platforms aren't important. They can be really important, depending on your business model. There's a lot that having social media followers can do for you, but if you want someone to see your ad, photo, or video, there's a better chance that they look at it in their email inbox than in their Facebook Feed.

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