Facebook can help -but also RUIN your business
I know, we all know…Facebook changed the internet and our lives from the first years of its existence
When all of this started?
Facebook was launched in July 2003 with an initial name as FaceMash which was changed to TheFacebook just one year after, on February 2004.
Since then, year after year it got bigger and bigger. Facebook even developed and used its own technologies like REACT (to find more, go to https://myprogrammingknowledge.com/articles/ and look for REACT related articles) and a lot of other programming technologies/libraries that can be used with REACT.
In our days people will trust it more than anything else and is no other platform where information will fly faster to a huge number of readers.
According to Facebook company statistics, in 2019 the platform had 2.38 billion active users.
Returning to the subject of this article, depending on a business activity we can confirm that a business can certainly benefit from using Facebook but is a big risk to stick on a long term only to it or any other social platforms in general, to promote products or services. Read further to find why.
In its first years of existance, Facebook had to grow organically because the social network of the world was almost inexitent and it didn't had big power.
Until many years ago, the only way for a company to be known and get more clients from online was to grow organically on the internet or pay for ads. These things changed completely once Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks have infiltrated so deeply into our lives.
Facebook is free and it will probably be free until the end of its life, but some of its services will always ask for charges.
To do publicity on Facebook is similar to doing publicity on Google Ads in the end. To make people hear about your business you have to pay for ads to be displayed to a certain amount of users targeted by geographical area, interests, age, and other criteria.
Why sticking only to Facebook is not good
Having experience with both ways of promoting a business (organic growth and paid marketing), we can say that Facebook is an amazing tool that has the power to boost a business position in the market most of the time for free, in no time.
For a better result, Facebook is offering paid adverts that can target the potential customers of a business much better than anything else, but as with any Ads platform, only doing paid marketing is a dependency that can put a business future in danger.
Facebook and generally paid adverts can be costly and run only for a short period of time. For a more displayed time, you will have to pay more. To reach more people you will have to pay more. For larger geographical areas, you will have to pay more. And you will realize, as a business that this is not the best way to promote yourself.
In parallel with using Facebook ads system, which at the beginning can help a lot getting into speed, is very important to also grow organically.
As a business if you rich a very big number of friends on Facebook and you can easily share something to all of them at once, you will depend on a list of people that is not fully under your control.
You can't automatically get their real email addresses, and you don't have all the rights you need to send private campaigns to them from outside Facebook.
To be able to do that you will need people's consent (to be in accordance with GDPR rules) to use their personal details with the purpose of sending promotional emails or messages.
In most cases, this will be a slow and inefficient process because people prefer to keep in touch through Facebook and avoid giving personal data directly to companies.
From another perspective, Facebook can harm a business if it's a publishing or ads platform as customers will come to the business more thru Facebook than from the business's own website.
For a publishing platform, Facebook can be very useful, as the shared articles will reach the readers very fast.
Though, if the content is coming from the readers (like comments) it will be extremely hard to train them to stop using Facebook for that and comment straight on the company website when the article was published.
Facebook also have a bad quality of destroying uploaded images. A filter is used to reduce their size and the process can't be reversed. The images uploaded in this way will always be small in size and only good to be displayed digitally on a low resolution, and impossible to be used for print or at a bigger size than is received. Plus, for some reason, they can not be opened on Photoshop or any image editor to be edited and reused in other places and this can be a big downside for companies that use images from customers or the public(as a design studio, or a reporter that just received on its Facebook page an image from a person involved in an incident).
Imagine having a website as a fashion house and you do a contest for the best creation from your users. You ask for images to do the preselection, but the users will avoid, for commodity, to use the specific form you created for the images to be uploaded and use the business Facebook to send the images.
In this way, these downsized images will not be good for any catalog or print you might want to do and a lot of frustration will come from that.
If you have a business that lives from a website with ads, Facebook, if used to share the ads, will kill your business because the users will feel more comfortable adding the ads on your Facebook page, than on your own website.
All these problems can be partially avoided if, in parallel with using Facebook or other social platforms, you do some constant work to grow organically, with your own company forces by:
- doing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation),
- writing about your activity on your website,
- optimizing your content,
- sharing your content,
- exchanging links with partners, and other web websites,
- getting emails and names from users with consents that you can use them to send emails and campaigns,
- sending notifications to previous visitors.
By doing that you will improve your website position in Google and you will be able to reach customers and potential customers without the need of Facebook or any other social platform.