Is Facebook enough for promoting my business online?
On a daily basis, I communicate and interact with business owners who serve various industries. One thing I hear very often is “Check out my business page on Facebook”. Without a doubt, Facebook is easily one of the largest social media websites or communities. Additionally, it is a very useful tool which I recommend for interacting with your audience, creating buzz, introducing new products and services as well as driving traffic to your website.
Facebook is a great facilitator of two way conversation between your brand and prospects or customers. This is awesome and for the most part useful and affordable compared to traditional marketing. Facebook will help you meet customers where they spend most of their time and this is a good thing but your goal should be to convert this Facebook attention (eye balls) to traffic for your website. Here’s why:
– Subscriptions: Facebook makes no grantee that everyone who clicks “Like” on your page will see your updates in their news feed. Therefore despite all the hard work and effort you put into obtaining your 1,000 or even 100,000 page likes only a very small percentage of people will actually see your updates. Facebook will then conveniently encourage you to pay via boosts and other paid services to increase the chances of your updates reaching more people. Whereas if you collect the email address of visitors to your website you will be able to reach everyone directly at almost no additional costs.
– Control of customer experience: because you decide how your website is presented, you can have full control of the experience of the visitor. This empowers you to set goals for conversion based on your own criteria.
– Adverts: usually distract audience from your priorities. While interacting with your brand on Facebook, users are being courted by others as well. Facebook adverts are continuously competing for users’ attention because that’s how they earn revenue; it’s also in their best interest to use your supplied content to advertise back to you and the traffic (eye balls) you direct to their platform. However by directing your Facebook community to your website you have an opportunity for their undivided attention and can better present the value of your product or service.
Wrap up:
The use of social media is important, and useful to your efforts of online marketing and relationship building, however your ultimate goal should be to bring the conversation and interaction back to your website; your official web presence.
How do you use Facebook and other social media websites to drive traffic to your website?
