A few weeks ago Ms. Kim Gaskins from KGaskinsConsulting.com posted and outstanding article titled Why Facebook is Not Enough. In the article, Kim describes:
- Benefits of ensuring your business’ online presence attains numerous entry points
- Facebook Is Not Set Up to Provide Information in a Cohesive Way
- You Need to Build an Email List Too
- You Don’t Own Your Facebook Page
As a small business owner and consultant, I can personally attest to these great points and will add my own tips.
Don’t place your eggs in one basket
Whether you sell exclusively on one marketplace (Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Shopify) or market on one website (Facebook, YouTube, Google +), placing your presence on one avenue is a recipe for disaster. There more avenues you can effectively manage, the wider your reach will be. Terms and conditions change, consumers shift their use (remember MySpace?) and if you’re only popular or accessible through one channel, you risk missing out on new clients and customers.
Talk WITH me, not AT me
Facebook pages are great for sharing and broadcasting information… As long as you’re willing to pay to reach your followers. You heard that right, Facebook Pages derives its income by selling ads and promoting your posts at a cost. So if you’ve managed to acquire loyal fans and followers, they will not reach your audience every time you post. Instead, a small percentage of your fans will view your posts on their timeline. What’s more, part of the social media experience is communicating with others. Pages makes it challenging for your fans to interact with one another.
I recommend establishing a corresponding Facebook Group/Google + Community/ Reddit Category relating to your field, and allowing for your fans to communicate, share ideas, comments and more.
If You Build It, They Will Come
You’re collecting email subscribers, aren’t you? There are too many benefits to creating an email list. Here are some of my favorites:
- Build a personal relationship with your audience
- Offer exclusive information and content to your subscribers
- Solicit comments, feedback and improve your brand
Building an email list can help you locate your customers, and hopefully promote a relationship where they will become repeat customers. Going by the 80/20 rule, 80% of all your business comes from 20% of all your customers. So it should go without saying that it’s in your best interest to increase your repeat customers right?
As Kim noted in her article,
The most important factor in your online marketing efforts is your website. You control it, you own it, and you won’t be wiped out just because someone else decides your content isn’t good enough, or appropriate. You can’t be wiped out without any warning like you can with social media like Facebook. Until and unless these facts change, you still need a self-hosted website to where you drive traffic from social media.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fish where the fish are, it just means you need to fish in several rivers and not just one.
Are you tracking where your business traffic is coming from? What strategies have you adopted to ensure your business doesn’t risk being stove piped. Comment below, I’d love to hear about it!
Many small business owners have jumped on the Facebook Page bandwagon. Some are even abandoning the idea of having web pages and blogs in favor of a Facebook Page. It seems so much easier than the other options. However, this is a huge mistake. Facebook is not enough in the world of online marketing.
Source: Why Facebook Isn’t Enough