Picture this: you’ve found the social platform that works for your business.
You’ve nurtured your social presence for years, growing a following of multiple thousands that provides a steady drip of inbound leads, brand awareness and overall name recognition. You’ve found your flow, and you’re happy to keep feeding that channel as a low-cost, high-impact form of marketing.
And then, one day, you run afoul of the platform’s guidelines, and years worth of hard work is suddenly erased.
What would that mean for your business?
While you may be lucky enough to only relate in theory, many businesses have experienced this very issue, leaving them at square one when it comes to their audience and marketing. It’s something I’ve seen multiple times over my years as business owner and Chief Marketing Officer.
In as recently as December of 2025, the European Commission lost access to its X advertising control panel following accusations by the media giant of taking advantage of an exploit in X’s Ad Composer. Not so curiously, this suspension came about following a €120 million fine imposed on the company by the European Commission for not adhering to privacy laws… and specifically was brought about in reference to a post by the Commission promoting said fine.
The European Commission boasts a hefty 1.8 million followers on X. While they haven’t lost access to those entirely, a key platform – paid advertising on X – has been taken from them in one fell swoop, entirely at the mercy of a notoriously fickle platform.
The importance of spreading out your audience
Luckily, the European Commission isn’t fighting for eyes in the modern world. Many businesses, though, cannot say the same, and the sudden death knell of the EC’s X advertising strategy does raise an important issue: the potentially ruinous effects of putting all of your eggs in the same basket in the digital age.
After all, the European Commission will soldier on without access to X advertising in their toolkit… but would your business be able to say the same?
Most businesses will have a winning platform; the one where content performs the most easily, your audience stays engaged and the followers tick up. Perhaps it’s your founder’s LinkedIn account or your company’s Instagram or, for that matter, a high-performing X account.
It’s wherever a business finds themselves regularly interacting with, and growing, their audience.
Now, if you look at the European Commission’s X predicament, you’ll start to get a picture of why this approach can have some very serious implications for your business. One wrong step, and that audience you’d worked so hard to build can be gone in an instant.
What would happen if you lost your main channel tomorrow?
It’s an important question to ask yourself. A few more points to consider: where is your audience clustered now? And if you lost contact with them through that channel, would you have another means of staying in touch? If not, what would that mean for your visibility and sales pipeline?
If it’s a scary thought, then I’ve proven my point; despite the sheer volume of so many channels at our disposal in this day and age, many of us find ourselves confining our marketing efforts to one big hitter and a few little ones, if time allows. What happens if your white whale disappears? And if your audience was that easy to lose in the first place… were they ever really yours to begin with?
What at first seems to be an overly-dramatic thought experiment can quickly reveal a large gap in not only a company’s marketing strategy, but their overall risk mitigation.
So, the next question to ask yourself: do you own your audience?
If your customers are all in a long line on Instagram, that’s great for now, but they’re about as much as they are yours as they are your best competitor’s, and they’re as good as gone if the Meta overlords say as much. That alone is proof that you don’t own them – at best, you’re renting them.
How do you own your audience ?
Luckily, there are strategies that you can employ to ensure that your audience is being accounted for and protected from random extinction events. Let’s dig in.
Spread out your risk
Utilise other channels – and I don’t mean ‘take your latest post and whack it up on five platforms’. You need to make sure that there are clear benefits to following your business across platforms; no rinsing and repeating, but expansion and added value on each platform your audience follows you on. If your newsletter is where they look for breaking industry news, your TikTok should be where they find short-form tips and tricks, and your LinkedIn should be where they stay aware of new services, tech, systems or products that your company is introducing.
Create an ecosystem of content
Dip in to new mediums and find creative ways to integrate them into your current content strategy. Try snippets on TikTok that point to long-form videos on YouTube. Start building a community on Instagram that’s connected to an email newsletter where people can stay apprised of daily, weekly, or monthly industry insights. Make sure that your audience feels that each platform offers unique value, but are frequently given good reason to cross the boundary of one to the other.
Optimise your CRM and data collection
While the likes of Medium or Substack may be tempting, you need to build a community that you are completely in control of. In this day and age, collecting your customers’ data (within acceptable and generally respectful privacy guidelines, of course) is how you stay on top of any potential hiccups across channels. This is how you own your audience and protect against any broader turmoil in the open waters.
Ultimately, it’s one of the key risk mitigation strategies you can employ when it comes to marketing and visibility.
Many eggs, many baskets
Now, all of this isn’t to say that you should leave your current audience to the wolves. That’s the beauty of this multi-channel, digital-first world: you can, and should, nurture your customers and prospective customers across mediums. This will allow you a high level of visibility, adaptability and resilience.
The key is to find balance and stay aware of the potential risks that can arise when relying too heavily on one. And most importantly? Have a core audience list that you can truly say that you own; they will be the backbone of your marketing strategy.
James Le Gallez (main picture) is the Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Edward & James, a qualified marketing consultancy helping professional service providers make confident decisions, execute effectively and grow with intent.
Working across finance, legal and beyond, Edward & James helps professional service businesses get to the strategic heart of their work, whether it be the first week of their company or the thousandth. Get in touch today: [email protected]
