An opinion: Borrowed vs. owned — why I wouldn’t build on social media alone

I first came across the concept of owned, earned, paid and borrowed media while studying for my bachelor’s degree in communications management. A simple framework for categorising the channels we use to reach people, based on our relationship with them.

Social media falls under borrowed media. A website falls under owned.

It’s a distinction that feels increasingly relevant when we build careers, incomes and, to some extent, entire lives around our online presence.

On social media, we can spend years creating work, finding our people and growing a business. But the space in which all of this happens still belongs to someone else. They set the rules. They decide what gets seen. And our access to the audience we’ve built remains subject to decisions we have very little say in.

That feels like a fragile foundation for something we depend on.

A website comes with its own dependencies, of course. It needs hosting, maintenance and a way for people to find it. Owning a space doesn’t automatically bring an audience. But it does give us more control over how our work is presented, organised and experienced.

Ideally, I think the two should work together. Social media can be a place for discovery and conversation, a way to invite people into a space of our own. Somewhere the relationship has a chance to continue beyond the next post.

I’m writing this partly as a reminder to myself. It’s easy to keep putting energy into the channel that offers the most immediate response, while leaving the quieter work of building a website for another day.

But if our work is meant to sustain us over time, that quieter work deserves our attention too.

Using social media purely for pleasure is, of course, a different conversation. When our livelihood depends on it, though, I think it matters where we choose to build.