Tiger Woods wrapped up the year with a new blog post on his website. It reminded me that Tiger has been using his website to control the message of himself and his personal brand for more than a decade. It’s a unique way to use the power of your brand to make sure you’re benefiting the most from the information you provide to your followers.
Here’s an excerpt from the post A Full Season of Competition:
Looking ahead to next year, I’m just trying to win those big four tournaments, and obviously try to use other events to prepare for them and try to win them as well. I’ve had to alter my practice schedule because my kids come first. They’re my No. 1 priority. It takes a little better time management on my part to figure all that out, but I expect to play a similar number of events.
There is a part at the end about Tiger’s Stanford team playing my Wisconsin Badgers. Well, I’m a fair weather college fan, but being from Wisconsin you know I have to root for the home team. We’ll see how it works out.
Let’s look at a few of the points of the Tiger Woods blogging strategy.
Sharing Information with Followers
It seems the biggest reason Tiger Woods uses his own website for updates like this is to share information with his followers. He wants to own the content. He wants to control the message.
If you look on Tiger’s social pages like Twitter and Facebook you’ll see that he does post photos and give some quick updates. There are also videos shared that make it worthwhile for people to follow him.
But when it comes to larger bits of information he sticks with his own website.
With news of the new Instragram and Facebook terms hitting the Internet this week it’s again worthwhile to look at how others are handling the content they publish.
Tiger Woods has seemed to use the strategy of using his website as the base of his online content distribution. He shares information on social channels like Twitter, Facebook and Google+, but only to further his overall brand.
Businesses in any industry can take the same approach. Social media is great when you can build your own audience based on the audiences of others.
The PR industry has long been built on this concept. When you’re new or in decline as a brand you want others with large audiences to write about you or cover you so their audience can potentially become part of yours.
For online activity the website you own is your biggest asset. Look to build your asset as much as you can. You want people coming to your site. You want email subscribers.
Use social media and other audiences only to build your own audience.
It’s what Tiger Woods has been doing for decades and it appears like something he’ll be doing for the rest of his career. If it’s working for him it can certainly for you and your company.