Thread by @awilkinson

Would you rather have 100,000 email newsletter subscribers growing 15% a year ✉️

OR

1 million followers on Twitter growing 50% a year? 📶

For me, I would 1000% take the email subscribers.

That seems insane. Read on to find out why... 👇

The best businesses are impenetrable to competitors 🏰

Nobody gets to dictate how they operate other than the government 🙅

And they are invulnerable to competition, have a captive customer base, and control all key inputs of their business...

Social platforms are the opposite:

1. There's always an algorithm filtering your content from your audience. A post may only be seen by 5,000 followers, even if you have 1MM if the algorithm doesn't deem it worthy... 🤯🤯🤯

2. You are in a constant knife fight with competitors. Millions of people tweet similar things to you on a daily basis and if their tweets win out in the algorithm, you get drowned out...

👯🤼🧑‍🤝‍🧑👯🤼🧑‍🤝‍🧑

3. Like optimizing for Google SEO, the algorithm can suddenly change and your posts can be de-prioritized or miscategorized. It's a black box. And you'll never know what happened...

4. You can be de-platformed depending on the policies, which seem to change frequently. Something as simple as a targeted group of bots reporting you can get you kicked off, with limited recourse. Boom, loud speaker gone!...

5. At any given time any of this can change on a dime as the platform changes its business model, bows to political pressure, etc... 👮

Email, on the other hand:

1. Direct line to your audience's inbox 📩

2. Free and open decentralized protocol that can't be taken away 🌿...

3. 100,000 subscribers = direct line to 100,000 people's inboxes at the very moment you send the email instead of being at the mercy of algorithms....

The ultimate, of course, is to use social media algorithms to your advantage, increasing your organic reach massively, then converting those followers to safer means of communication like email.

It's a double edged sword, and like anything, you want to be diversified 😉