There is no doubt that Facebook it popular with over 40 million active small business pages. So, should you consider replacing your website with a Facebook small business page?
Let’s start with Facebook…
Facebook Page for Business
What are the benefits of a Facebook business page?
- It’s free to set up
- It’s easy to set up
- Most people know how to use it
- It’s reliable
- You can easily control your advertising spend
- It’s highly likely your target market uses Facebook every day
So it might be a good place to start, but is it enough? We think not and here is why.
What are the challenges with Facebook?
- You don’t own the content, any content and imagery/video.
- You can’t control who sees your content, not every story or image, video you post will be seen by people who have liked your page.
- You have limited control of your brand, you can add your logo and a nice header page, but that’s about it.
- Facebook are also constantly upgrading their platform and you need to figure out how to manage the change.
- There is also the issue of legitimacy with a business who only have a Facebook page, it can put doubt in some consumers minds.
Facebook is a reliable, cost effective solution for an online presence and they have a great help centre and online community.
We recommend that you don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook basket.
We think a Facebook business page should be an integral part of your online strategy, provided it has a call to action and funnels customers to your website.
Don’t forget Google still rules
In our opinion, Google is still king when it comes your online presence and yes, Google will return your Facebook page. However, you can’t control the search terms like you can with dedicated SEO on your website. You aim should be to channel as many potential customers to book by ensuring they find you easily. This is best done by optimising your website with great SEO.
Consider your Facebook page and your website complimentary: you should use your Facebook business page (and other social media platforms) to engage your customers and use them as the social platforms they are designed to be. They were designed to share stories of interest, images and videos about your business, town, region or State, answer questions and for Facebook only promote yourself about 20% of the time.
Use your website as the go to hub where you not only inform but close the deal. Your website is where you have full control of your customer journey.
Finally, some tips
- Use SEO to optimise your website and ensure the search engines find you, once they do makes sure your site is;
- visually appealing
- reliable
- easy to navigate
- your content is engaging and encourages them to book at every opportunity
- Make sure your Facebook page has your website address clearly displayed and you link to your website
- Create a visual relationship between your Facebook page and your website so consumers who navigate through.
- Last but not least: create the content in the from of blog post on your website, and share it on Facebook with the link back to your website.
So the mantra is, use all the social media platforms engage with your customers, the funnel them to your website and once they are there make sure your website captures and converts them!
