Why do I need a website when I already use Facebook? This is a common enough question. In fact, I heard it the last time I was getting my hair cut by Anicia.
"We post everything to Facebook because that's where the people are. Why do we need to do anything else?"
And that's a fair assessment. The people are on Facebook. They hang out every day looking for entertainment, information, and, inadvertently, even a little bit of a hair style or hair product sales pitch from my friend and stylist. We discussed it for a while and here is how I explained it.
Website = Home Base
I started with my favorite analogy. It's by author and platform expert Michael Hyatt. In his book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, Michael offers up his concept that your website is your home base while social media resources like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are embassies on rented soil. He went on to define outposts (Google Alerts, etc) as listening stations. We'll hit these concepts up another day.
Keep your embassies busy representing your home base, your website, and they will provide a steady stream of traffic, or immigrants, if you will, to your website.
You Don't Control Leased Ground
She accepted this concept readily enough but asked the logical question of "what does it do for me that Facebook doesn't?"
The leased (even though it's free) ground where your Facebook embassy resides is just that: leased from someone else. Someone else can change the rules you live by. Someone else can evict you.
As social media and content strategist Jay Baer wrote, "... you’re essentially building your marketing program on rented land. The amount of control Facebook has (or will have) over the data and interactions on the global Web is truly unprecedented (and I trust them even less than Google.)"
Sure, Facebook needs you. They need as many yous as they can get because otherwise they don't have an audience. But as they cater more and more to the big yous (big businesses) of the world, the little yous (like you and me) tend to get crushed between the wheels of progress.
Which wheels, you ask? The advertising wheels. As your small business uses the free aspects of social media to promote itself, the big players fork over money to Facebook (or Twitter or whoever) to drop their messages into the mix. Who does Facebook (et al) listen to? The businesses that are showing them the money, of course.
For example, how many of your fans on Facebook actually see your status updates? According to research done by Pagelever (now Unified Social,) it could be as little as 7.5% or as much as a whopping 16%. How can you improve that? Allow Facebook to boost your post, of course! But what does that involve? You handing over money, of course! And if you don't some bigger business will.
You ARE In Control at Home
Home is where the heart (and the control) is.
So what does all this muck about advertising mean? It means that Facebook is here for a profit first and foremost. Therefore, they could change the rules at any time and dictate how your lease on their ground works.
By having your own website, you have a slice of real estate, a home base as Michael Hyatt called it, that is yours to control as you see fit. If Facebook changes, your website remains. If Facebook begins to lose favor with the masses or goes away entirely (remember Geocities and MySpace?), your website remains and can begin working with the new form of social media that sprouts up.
If you want to add a new page to your website, like a listing of stylists that Anicia might want, you can do that on your website. You might be able to do it on leased ground and you might not. Of course, just because you can do it now doesn't mean that Facebook, or some other social media landlord, won't change the rules on you.
The Quick Takeaway
Facebook is great! So is Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and Instagram and so forth and so on. But don't build your online presence solely upon someone else's property. Keep a website as your home base and then market that website like crazy through your social media embassies.
As a side note, we are currently developing Anicia's website. Maybe that will be a case study soon.
Photo Credit: Featured image courtesy of Michael Hyatt (http://michaelhyatt.com/platform/media)