The Risk of Social Media Dependency: SEO and the Influencer Marketing Space

There’s a growing problem in the influencer marketing space with content creators. We’ve talked about it on this show before. But there never seems to be any great push to solve for this particular problem. 

The main focus of many an influencer today is creating videos for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. For posting Stories on various platforms and engaging their followers and fans there. But those platforms aren’t owned by the creators. There’s a significant amount of risk influencers and content creators are taking by putting their main source of income on borrowed land.

Montana recently banned TikTok. I don’t necessarily think that ban will stick. Nor do I think TikTok will soon be banned across the U.S. But it’s not far-fetched for that to come to fruition. If it does, TikTok creators could be in a very bad position.

The problem in the influencer marketing space is that we’ve gotten away from having our own websites. Owned channels. Creators are assuming the social networks are forever and won’t go away. They’re putting the precious eggs of their business in someone else’s basket.

I hate to use this phrasing, but “Back in my day …” you wrote blog posts and had your own website. You used social networks to promote the content there and build your email lists. You owned not just your content, but your audience as well. 

Creators today don’t think that way and it may come back to bite them.

If you do have a website, you probably know a thing or two about SEO, or search engine optimization. Search engines like Google are the lifeblood of just about any website’s traffic. Figuring out how to rank well for certain keywords or phrases helps more traffic come to your site, subscribe to your content or buy from you. 

But if these creators don’t have websites, what are they to do? Can they do anything?

Kevin Roy is the CEO of GreenBananaSEO out of Boston. He’s helped dozens of companies drive growth and revenue using innovative digital marketing approaches. His company has been ranked several times in Inc. Magazine’s 5000 Fastest Growing Companies.

I asked Kevin to join us on Winfluence to talk about the state of SEO today, how creators can leverage it to build their brands and businesses, and what they can … or can’t do … to use SEO to build their social network cache even if they don’t have a website. 

We’ll talk to Kevin about that and more today on the show.

As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai.

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