I prefer to manage a website as my main platform while most wine enthusiasts are concentrating on boosting their social media presence. I do use social media to share headlines, draw attention and message, but the bulk of my content stays firmly on my site. While gaining followers on social platforms is useful and even fun, it’s not my primary goal.
You might think this approach is a bit old-school, but I see it as being more about thinking differently, controlling the narrative and planning for the unexpected. The truth is, social media posts can be quite fleeting. Posts are quickly overshadowed by newer ones. On Instagram on the phone, I often read something and the whole feed auto-updates completely losing what I am reading. Posts are at the mercy of ever-changing algorithms that can hide or even accidentally ban content or the whole account without notice and with no visible means of rectifying. There’s also the issue of potentially having your content placed next to posts or adverts you’d rather not be associated with, which can sour the context. As Twitter has shown, a whole platform can become toxic. To me it feels a bit like building on sand, unstable and unpredictable.
As an example, the Instagram ‘algorithm’ has three times temporarily banned me from commenting and viewing others’ followers because it mistakenly thought I was posting fake reviews in exchange for money. It’s wrong and easily error prone for Instagram to make decisions based on information they actually have no access to. It’s easy to hide behind process, but let’s not forget that every ‘algorithm’ is created and put in place by humans.
There’s a lot of talk about AI taking over and fears that website content will simply be scraped. But honestly, I’m all for my content being picked up in this way. In this new age of web searches dominated by AI, authenticity and truth counts more than ever, and people are more-often checking the facts for themselves, via links provided by AI, which brings them right back to the source. The landing visitor stats from my website have shown a shift from traditional search engines to AI-driven searches, highlighting this new trend.
winedrinker.com web traffic is increasing faster than the total of my social followers
Having my own site also means I get anonymous web site statistics, hosted by the site itself not Google or anyone, that provide a much clearer picture of what people are reading. I can see not just how many, but how engaged they are with the content and which topics resonate the most. For example, I know the majority of first-time traffic comes from people searching for a review of a specific wine each time. They might be in store or web browsing, deciding whether to buy or not. This kind of insight is priceless and reaffirms my commitment to keeping my website at the heart of my digital presence.
