MSPs, there’s a danger lurking inside my marketing advice… platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram are actually “borrowed audiences”. Here’s how to build an “owned audience”. Also this week, how to turn boring compliance updates into lead gen on LinkedIn, and how to sell more cyber security by telling stories.

Welcome to Episode 340 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The danger of building your MSP’s marketing on borrowed platforms

Can I be honest about something? There’s a danger lurking inside the marketing advice that I give to you every single week in this podcast and I want to address it head on.

If you’ve been listening to or watching this podcast for a while, you’ll know that I tell you to build your audience on LinkedIn to make connections, post every day, send messages, and just grow your network. And of course, I stand by all of that. LinkedIn is still the number one place for MSPs to go farming for new business.

But here’s the thing… LinkedIn is not yours.

Your connections, your content, your years of relationship building. All of it lives on a platform that belongs to someone else.

Well, it’s Microsoft, I mean, they own LinkedIn. So that means that someone, some vice president of Microsoft hidden away in a building somewhere can change the rules at any point without warning, without apology, and without any obligation to protect what you’ve spent years building.

We have a name for platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram within marketing. They’re called “borrowed audiences”. And borrowed audiences are really cool right up until the moment that they’re not. So let me give you two examples from my world that really bring this to life. And the first one involves my own MSP Marketing Edge Facebook group, which we use for member support.

So I started that in 2017 and for years that group has been a buzzing community with members sharing ideas and asking questions and getting answers and just helping each other out. It’s been great. But over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed something. The engagement has dropped significantly and it’s not because our members stopped caring or because the content within the Facebook group got worse. It’s because Facebook changed its algorithm. It stopped showing content from the groups that you’re in, in your feed. And you might have noticed this yourself if you still use Facebook.

You’re probably still a member of 10 or 20 groups and they’re all things that you’re really interested in. But the content from those groups never really appears in your feed anymore. You have to remember to go to those groups. And instead in your feed, you just see content from other places and other people trying to sell you stuff. And Facebook, for whatever reason, has prioritised that. So I’ve still got great content in my group, there’s great help there and great conversations, but some of my members never see it because they don’t remember to go and look at it. And the algorithm has decided without asking anybody that group content wasn’t worth promoting anymore. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg.

I didn’t get the memo on that. Well, actually there was no memo on that, there was no announcement, the rug just got pulled slowly and silently. And that was a risk. It crept up on me. And obviously we’ve now actually gone and we’ve started other communities for our members on other platforms. Technically, we’re going to face the same problems again, but at least we can get around the Facebook algorithm problem with our other places that we can build communities.

Now the second example involves a friend of mine, Matt Solomon of Better Tracker, who’s very, very well known in the channel. A couple of Christmases ago, Matt got what I can only described as L...