Social media platforms are amazing distribution channels that can drive serious engagement for your content, but when are you giving them too much?

Owned Properties vs Rented Land

The fine folks over at the Content Marketing Institute always advocate for owning your digital content…

Robert and I discuss two recent developments that clearly illustrate why you should not build your content house on rented land: LinkedIn has placed limits on your ability to download contact information about your connections, and Google Plus as a social network is no more.
— Joe Pulizzi, This Old Marketing Podcast, Ep. 89

I’m often surprised by how many groups I see uploading all their photos and news items directly to Facebook. What’s more, that content often isn’t published anywhere else, not even on their own website or blogs, so they’re effectively giving the social network all their precious history.

Hail was born out of the idea that organisations need to own their content space on the web. That’s why we give you the ability to completely brand it with your name and logo and continue to ship features like the Homepage and custom domain support. Plus our API means that Hail customers can take their content anywhere they choose.

Owning your content doesn’t mean you can’t have your cake and eat it too, which is why we’ve built in omni-channel publishing also.

Omni-What?

Omni-channel publishing is when your content management system (CMS) can push content out to all your channels such as: email, website, blogs and social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Hail customers will be very familiar with this concept and our 'create once, publish everywhere' mantra.

Channels Come and Channels Go

If there's anything we've learnt about the web it's that what's hip today can quickly be surpassed by what's coming tomorrow. The likes of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn might feel like cornerstones of the internet, but we would've said the same about MySpace, Friendster, and Digg not so long ago — remember those?

So the best strategy is to publish your content out there so that your community has plenty of choice with how and when they engage with it, but don't focus on the platforms. At the end of the day, they get to call the shots, and they may not be around forever. Plus the ones that do stick around often have a nasty habit of changing the rules on us. So as long as your CMS is omni-channel ready now, and clever enough to roll with the punches as new publishing platforms come and go, you'll be able to rest easy in your future-proofed house and focus on what you do best — storytelling.

Not yet a Hail user? Sign up for a free 15 day trial and see how easy it is to create beautiful content and build your community.