Even though mailing lists seem like a thing of the past, they are still an irreplaceable building block of any creative business. Regardless of whether you’re writing daily blogs like me, or if you use your mailing list to sell or notify people about your work and exhibitions — if you’re a creative, you should start building your list.

The main reason to do so is simple: ownership. When we post images on Instagram or write anything on Facebook, we do not fully own the content and more importantly the control over that content.

What this means is if Facebook decides to flag our posts as spam, they will delete all of our content and we are left with nothing. No appeal or other way of correcting such a decision exists as obviously the amount of users that Facebook or Instagram have is in the billions, so customer support isn’t really one of their strengths.

Something like this happened to me a few weeks ago: I use automation to post my blog to various platforms and through several different channels (e-mail, Facebook, Blogger, Tumblr, Steemit …) to increase its visibility and grow my audience.

It was all working like it should; I added lots of art oriented groups and other channels and proposed to post my daily blog in the application (if they had one). If the moderators of Facebook groups found my blog wasn’t appropriate for their audience, they messaged me and I removed them from my automation and no harm was done.

Then, one day, I started to get messages from Facebook that one of my posts was flagged as spam and deleted from the site. And then another one came, and another one, until about 200 if not more posts got deleted in a matter of hours. 

Two months of hard work to provide quality content for anyone interested vanished over night.

And of course no-one could help me resolve the issues (that probably happened because of a Bit.ly link I use to track how many people actually click my podcast links in the blog). In the end, the situation was clear:

Nothing on social media is really under our control and our ownership.

But a mailing list is. It is the sole tool that we as creatives fully own and can do with it as we please (of course with respect to our audience — I use mine to send out my blog exclusively, you may decide to use your to also promote your work or try to sell your products). The point is: You decide. 

Regardless of whether Facebook or Instagram or any other social platform choose to stop promoting a feature — like Facebook’s decision to officially stop allowing creators to use automation to post on their website (albeit it is obviously still possible if done respectfully) — if we have a mailing list with people who genuinely care about what we have to say and get value from it, we will never loose the ability to stay in touch with them until they themselves decide to unsubscribe.

And the best part of course is, if we have less than 2000 followers, Mailchimp (and probably other platforms too) allow us to crate and manage our list for free, so having a list is as free as having an account on Twitter — but the difference is, we actually own the contents of our account!