Your Facebook page is not a website. It is part – and often an important part – of an online presence and digital marketing strategy, but it shouldn’t be your entire online marketing strategy. Facebook and other social media accounts are great additions to your online presence, but they are not a replacement for one. Read on to find out why.
[tweetthis]Your Facebook page is not a website.[/tweetthis]
1. Legitimacy.
Modern consumers search online to find the products and services that they’re looking for. At a minimum, potential new customers expect that you will have a website and that it will provide up-to-date contact information and a list of the services or products offered by your company. When potential new customers search for your website and the only item that comes up is a Facebook page (or other social media account), your business looks less trustworthy which translates to less sales.
Any one – and every one! – can and does set up a Facebook page for their next great business idea, and often those Facebook pages are abandoned within a couple of weeks. The public perception is that a legitimate business invests the necessary resources to have a professional online presence, and ideally one that reflects their commitment to good customer relationships.
[tweetthis remove_url=”true”]When potential new customers search for your website and the only item that appears is a Facebook page, your business looks less trustworthy.[/tweetthis]
2. SEO
Your Facebook / social media account is not going to rank in the search engines, especially compared to your competition who most likely *does* have a real website. A Facebook page or social media account can help your website rank higher in search engine rankings by driving more traffic to your website and providing legitimate outbound links, but a social media account by itself is going to do very little to get your business name on the first page of a Google search.
3. Control
You may be posting lots of great content to your Facebook page, including sales flyers, promotions, coupons, and smart articles that your customers would be super interested in – if they ever saw them. The problem is that Facebook controls which of your customers sees your posts, and how often your posts show up in your followers news feeds.
Facebook has good reasons for doing this, as unfair as it may seem at first. For one, they want businesses to utilize paid advertising. That’s one of the ways Facebook makes money. Another is that people get annoyed when business pages push too much content to their feeds. It feels spammy and is annoying to scroll through. To mitigate this issue, Facebook only shows a handful of all of your posts to so many people every so often.
A far better strategy is to have a blog on your website that features all of your great promotions, specials, and awesome articles and then push those updates to *all* of your social media accounts. This strategy is far more impactful than simply hoping a handful of your followers will see your posts on Facebook and are then reminded that your business exists.
4. Customer Relationships
Facebook does not help you to build better customer relationships. At best you can hope someone will “like” your page, see occasional posts in their newsfeed and then come back and visit your page again sometime in the future. A website, on the other hand, allows you to cultivate a list of contacts through avenues such as newsletters and sign-ups for promotions or other specials. You can also include surveys, polls, and quizzes as ways to get know the visitors to your website. The possibilities are endless with a website; not so much with a social media page.
Most importantly, however, is that a website provides a greater opportunity to communicate the value of your products or services to your audience. Through a combination of branding elements, imagery, and targeted content your website carries a persuasive power that social media pages cannot match.