Your Social Media Following Isn't Yours

That following you’ve spent months building on Instagram or Facebook?

It’s not yours.

Not one follower, not one contact, nothing.

You’re renting space on someone else’s platform, and like any landlord they can change the rules whenever they want.

They can decide your posts reach fewer people.

They can tweak the algorithm (the thing that decides who sees what) without telling you.

They can shut your account down with no warning, and good luck getting a real person on the phone to sort it.

It happens, an account gets flagged or a terms update nobody read kicks in, and years of work goes with it - every connection, every potential customer, every bit of trust you’d built up.

I’m not trying to scare you.

That’s just what building on ground you don’t own looks like.

Compare that to an email list

Every address on your list is yours.

You collected it, you’ve got permission to use it, and if Instagram disappeared tomorrow your list would still be sat there.

If Facebook changes the rules again and shows your posts to even fewer people, your email list doesn’t care.

Socialinsider’s figures from August 2026 put the average Facebook post in front of 1.25% of a page’s followers, and the average Instagram post in front of 3.2%.

I know what you might be thinking.

“Nobody reads emails anymore.”

They do, when the email’s worth reading.

The DMA’s 2025 email report put the average UK marketing email open rate at 35.9% (Apple’s privacy settings flatter that number a bit, but it’s a different world to 1.25%).

Not every email, not every time, but for staying in touch with people who already know you, it’s more reliable and more personal than any social post.

When someone gives you their email address, they’re saying “yea, I want to hear from you”, and that’s a very different thing to someone who scrolled past and tapped follow.

Where this fits in the Perfect Customer Journey

Social media lives mostly in stage one, Get Noticed.

It’s great for being seen, and I’m not telling you to come off it.

But stage two is Connect, the bit where someone goes from “I’ve seen you” to “here are my details”.

If someone sees your post, likes it and moves on, you’ve got nothing.

You can’t follow up.

You can’t stay in touch.

You’re relying on them seeing your next post too, and the one after that, and with the way these platforms work that’s never guaranteed.

An email list bridges that gap.

So what do you actually do?

You don’t need a complicated system, fancy software or a designer.

You need three things.

Something worth signing up for. A short guide, a checklist, an answer to a small problem your customers actually have. It doesn’t need to be long, it needs to be useful.

A way to collect the emails. Most email tools give you a basic sign-up form. Put it on your website and mention it in your posts.

Emails that go out regularly. Not every day, necessarily, but steadily. A useful weekly email will do more for your business than posting seven days a week and hoping the algorithm’s in a good mood.

Say you run a football coaching academy.

Most of your parents probably follow you on Facebook, and that’s fine for the photos from Saturday’s games, but when you open bookings for the summer camp you want to email every one of them directly instead of hoping the post reaches them.

The email doesn’t need to be perfect either.

It needs to be helpful, personal, and written like you actually give a crap about the person reading it.

The bigger picture

I’ve spoken to loads of service business owners who’ve put all their marketing eggs in the social media basket.

They’re not wrong to be on social.

But when I ask them what they’d do if their account disappeared tomorrow, most of them go quiet.

That’s the problem.

Start small if you need to, because 50 people who genuinely want to hear from you are worth more than 5,000 followers who’ve forgotten they ever clicked follow.

Your job today

Pick one small, useful thing you could give away for an email address.

Write it down. Just the title for now.

Then check your website has somewhere for people to sign up, and if it doesn’t, that’s tomorrow’s job.

Want to see where you stand?

Your socials are one of the things I check in Your Web Review, along with your website, Google profile and reviews. You get a video of me going through it all and the three things I’d fix first.

No big sales pitch.

Get your free Web Review

And if you’d like one short email every Sunday on making your marketing easier, get the Marketing Memo. It’s free (and yea, it’s an email list, so I practise what I preach).