Building a Home for the Stories: Why Social Media Shouldn't Be Your Entire Content Strategy

Social media is incredibly useful, but I think many organisations have accidentally turned platforms they do not own into the centre of their entire content strategy.

We create a post, publish it, watch the engagement for a day or two and then move on. Within a remarkably short period of time, a story that may have involved years of work, significant achievement or a fascinating individual has effectively disappeared down a timeline. That has increasingly made me think about the difference between simply publishing content and building a genuine content asset.

One of my early areas of focus at Cardiff Met Sport has been developing a stronger home for sports stories. There is an extraordinary amount happening across university sport, but telling those stories only through social media creates limitations. A proper article can be searched, shared, referenced, linked from newsletters and returned to months or even years later. It gives the story a permanent address.

This matters strategically because I increasingly see owned media as an asset rather than just another communications channel. Social platforms are extremely valuable for distribution, but ultimately we are operating inside somebody else's environment. Algorithms change, platforms rise and fall, organic reach fluctuates and we do not control the rules.

A website works differently. It allows an organisation to build a body of knowledge and stories that compound over time. One article about an athlete might attract relatively little attention on the day it is published, but it can later become relevant when that athlete achieves something internationally, appears in another piece of content or is discovered by someone researching Cardiff Met.

That compounding effect is something I have become particularly interested in through my wider marketing learning. We often assess marketing activity too quickly. A social post is judged after 24 hours. An email is judged by the end of the week. Yet brand building, search visibility and customer memory develop over much longer periods.

There is also a segmentation point here. Not every audience wants to consume information in the same way. A current student might discover a story on Instagram, while a parent or prospective student may find it through Google. An alumni audience might encounter it on LinkedIn. A governing body may be sent the direct article. The original story can remain the same while the routes into it change.

That makes the website the content hub and social media the distribution network rather than asking every platform to do everything.

I saw the same principle during my time at Aberystwyth Town. Social media could create immediate reach, but the website increasingly became the place where ticketing, information, sponsorship, events and long-form storytelling connected. The two worked better together than either could have worked alone.

The bigger lesson for me is that marketers should ask what they are building, not simply what they are posting. Fifty social posts might create fifty moments of attention. Fifty useful articles can gradually become an archive, search asset, recruitment tool, brand resource and evidence base.

Social media is still incredibly important. I use it every day and I expect that to continue. I simply no longer think it should be the place where an organisation's best stories go to disappear.