A Facebook page is one of the most influential ways to reach your audience.
Facebook pages are a great place for new small businesses to get started.
For a busy and budget-conscious small business owner, a Facebook page can be a great place to start. The platform provides many great tools to help build a solid foundation. With Facebook’s built-in audience and sharing tools it’s easier than ever to test the market for a product or a service.
Facebook pages provides tools to create and connect with your ideal audience.
Facebook pages give you the ability to:
- Build an engaged community
- Add an email signup to capture leads
- Sell products from your page
- Run ads to grow your audience or to entice them to action
Facebook has done its best to create a one-stop-shop for businesses.
And the winner is... your website!
Despite its amazing tools, Facebook pages aren’t a substitute for a quality website.
Google can't find you.
Google crawls about 20 billion web pages a day. If you’re not using a standalone website then chances are Google won’t be able to find you. Standard SEO techniques don’t apply to Facebook, and without that ability, it’s practically impossible to find you online. Without organic traffic from Google, you would be forced to “pay-to-play” with Facebook ads to increase your traffic. This can be costly when compared to free organic traffic.
You have to compete with everyone else.
When someone comes to your website, the website is designed to reflect your brand. You control what people see. You control what ads are run. The focus is on your business. On Facebook, you don’t have that luxury. It’s possible if someone comes to your Facebook page, they may see a competitor’s ad right there, next to your content. You also have to compete with Facebook’s branding, their look, their colors, and all its other distractions.
A website gives you credibility
When building an audience, you have to get people to know, like, and trust you. With Facebook, you can easily accomplish the first two, but gaining people’s trust demands more. You must build credibility with your audience. And having a website is far more credible than just a Facebook page—a website shows an investment in your brand.
Facebook won’t last forever.
Having your own space on the web is essential. You own it. You control it.
Facebook should be an important cog in your marketing wheel, but the hub of your wheel should be your business’s website.
