How Much Control Do You Have Over Your Social Media Content?

Aside from the fact that social media websites provide an amazing opportunity to get your content out to a mass audience, the downside is that you are typically accessing a free service that has the ability to terminate your account at any time and for any reason.

Most of the time you’ll never run up against this, unless you abuse the social media web site’s general rules. But their rules may surprise you.

For example, on both Facebook and Twitter, if you add friends rapidly, clicking to add multiple people in a set amount of time, you could get a warning that you are “adding friends too quickly”. On Facebook if you paste in an update that you had previously posted, or used their email system to resend out an email identical to a previously sent one, you could get a warning that you are posting or sending “duplicate content”. Twitter and Facebook both have algorithms in place to make sure that their systems are not abused. MySpace had this as well especially when it came to adding a lot of friends in succession. MySpace did not have much warning methods in place, and some people had their accounts shut down with little or no explanation.

Facebook spells out more clearly what you are doing to incur the infraction. And in fact often when you send an email in to their tech support, an actual person will provide some guidance as to why you received a warning. Twitter is a bit less threatening, with general “slow down” messages as opposed to Facebook’s warnings. Facebook also puts users in a penalty box of sorts, if you are snagged for adding too many friends at once, you’ll lose the ability to add anyone for a few days or longer. The problem resides in the fact that neither network has any posted guidelines on what is deemed too much, so it’s mostly a guessing game. The social network sites put in place these rules to keep spammers and over zealous users from making it a free-for-all. Twitter in particular has recently added rules to stop users from adding too many people by literally disconnecting the ability to add new friends. You may have gotten a notice recently that you are not able to add more friends.

Again, in general, most users never hit up against these roadblocks. But it does illuminate a really important issue, that your account and feature set, which you use to brand your identify, communicate with friends and network, could be shut down if the service decides it is best. So the key is to use the social network site as a speaker, not as the stereo. Your content should reside on your own server or website, on a site you pay for, a site you own, a site you can do anything you want. And then the content is pushed to your social network sites.

This can be done in a variety of ways, you can feed your RSS feed to Facebook quite easily, you can publish a link to your podcast, photos, audio and video to Twitter and Facebook in a few clicks. You can also duplicate the content from your website, domain or blog and have it also appear on the social network sites. But it’s often best to steer away from creating original content that only resides on these services. Always have a backup at another location and try to push the content to the social network site, so in the event, however unlikely, that your account is turned off, you are not losing hours, days and months of content that you cannot replace.

Social network sites are fantastic for broadcasting. Putting items on Facebook and Twitter specifically can gain your career at lot of traction. Just remember that these sites are focused on a prime user experience above all and their quality control growth has been helped by users not taking advantage of these tools and clogging things up. So continue to contribute to the networks, but do what most social media experts do, push out content to the social sites and always have most or all of it reside elsewhere, a place where you have complete control.

Do you have a website or domain that is the centerpiece for your content? Are you planning on creating one? Or do you use a social media site for your content?