Should your business have a website or a page on Facebook?
If Facebook was a country it would be the third biggest in the world. Because of Facebook's large membership, our clients at Online Design Bureau often ask if it still makes sense to build a website. Wouldn't it be better to focus on Facebook instead: they've got such a massive audience?
In the interest of full disclosure, I must add that we are a company that creates websites. We also engage in Facebook marketing and if Facebook was the holy grail, boy would we ditch web design and switch to a full service Facebook marketing company.
But why do we still make websites?
Well, stating that Facebook has such a large audience and therefore should be the main focus of a company is a bit of a reverse logic. While it is true that there are many people on Facebook, there are still a far lager amount of people on the web in general. And just because you have a Facebook Fan Page or group doesn't mean that you'll suddenly amass a lot of friends or fans - or even that your Facebook pages will get that many visitors. You can build it, but they won't come by some sort of bizarre magic.
Driving visitors to your Facebook page will differ greatly from driving traffic to a regular website, and it is true that social networks have traffic building mechanisms built in to them (e.g. the "like" button). But it is also true that you can integrate all these tools into your own website. Notice the social media bar at the bottom of this website, where you can interact between this page and the main social networks on the web.
But both marketing a website and promoting a Facebook page will cost you time, energy and money (they are sometimes interchangeable).
Social networks like Facebook however have an instability built-in that your website simply has not. Right now, Facebook is the hottest club in town. Everyone wants to get in, even though some are talking about leaving Facebook all together on Memorial Day. And that shows you how the web works, soon something else will come along and a new club becomes 'the place to be'. When that happens, all the time and effort that you've spent on building your Facebook presence will have been wasted. You might think that this is extremely unlikely, but it happens all the time. Three years ago, MySpace was the biggest, hippest club in town, today, it is a declining property.
It remains a strategic risk to put all your eggs in one basket and to put your entire online business presence on just one social network - a social network who's existence, popularity or even its functionality is not under your control.
That does not mean that you the power and attraction of social networks should be ignored.
We propose that you build your own Web site as a central hub and use other online resources like social networks, e-mail marketing campaigns and mini-websites as drivers of sustainable traffic.
The power of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is is that it enables your clients and readers to share information over their network.
It is therefore important to do three things:
- Have a presence on the most popular social networks
- Integrate these networks into your website
- Remain flexible enough to switch integration of networks with your website when the social networking landscape changes
Promoting yourself on social networks and building a website aren't mutually exclusive propositions. You build a website, than raise awareness of your website through profiles on various social networks. Make sure that everything in your profiles is linking to your website, because that is the place people can keep coming back to long after the social network has been reduced to an ancient city of ruins. Make sure that you actively engage the public on the most important networks (which currently are likely to be Facebook and LinkedIn) and feed the less important networks automated content from your RSS feeds and broadcasting applications (e.g. Ping.fm). Because social networks are more often visited than your website, it is also important to integrate them in your website and make it easy for your website visitors to connect with your social networking accounts. This creates a feedback loop between your website and the rest of the internet.
The era where your website was an isolated island in the wilderness of the internet are gone forever. Thanks to the advancements in SEO, social networking and RSS syndication the membrane between your site and the internet is as transparent as ever.
But you shouldn't count on the internet remaining as it is. The landscape is ever changing, and the roads that lead to your website are here today but could be gone tomorrow. Not to worry though, as old roads disappear, new roads will emerge, and central at them is your website and no-one can take that away from you.
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