Danny Sullivan wrote a nice case study about a movie Website that is hard to find. He wraps up his article by stipulating that “Facebook Is Not Your Website”.
This cautionary tale is nothing new in Web marketing. Last year Warren Colbert wrote “Facebook is not your website (no matter how much you wish it was)”. In fact, there are a LOT of “Facebook is not your Website” articles out there.
With so many people advising the general business community NOT to make Facebook their Websites, why is the message fizzling?
Furthermore, is there any benefit to using Facebook as a primary consumer outreach channel? A year ago Bloomberg noted a quiet trend among retailers who were shutting down their Facebook stores.
Facebook’s credibility as a business channel has been challenged several ways over since its Initial Public Offering last year. The service has failed to meet investor expectations and, worse, it has yet to prove that it can meet advertiser expectations. Matt McGee counted the number of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ mentions in the TV ad spots for the 2013 Super Bowl. Twitter outscored Facebook and Google+ wasn’t even in the game.
Facebook is a closed environment. It prevents crawlers from finding much of its content and it passes click traffic through its own redirection system. You don’t get much SEO benefit from using Facebook as a place for links. That said, anyone who has even a halfway decent collection of “friends” on Facebook may see a significant number of clicks on links posted to their Facebook accounts. I don’t use Facebook much but I automatically post links to new posts and forum discussions through Twitterfeed and people click on the links.
One cannot help but wonder, however, if Facebook isn’t taxing these click-throughs with their horrible user interface (the timeline structure is very complicated and hard to decipher). Finding people on Facebook is a nightmare. Worse, some people’s timelines are buried underneath a mountain of “facts” and other people’s timelines are right there where you can see them.
Facebook, like many other popular Websites, has moved away from pagination. Now its content endlessly scrolls and you cannot reasonably scan it all without temporarily locking up your browser. AJAX has proven to be about as user-unfriendly a tool as anything in Web development. Asynchronous page updates make it virtually impossible for people to scroll back and forth through content because every time you move toward the “bottom” of the page more content (if available) is added to it.
Reflective marketing has to offer a limited but beneficial user experience in order to channel consumer interest toward a primary destination. Facebook goes out of its way to “trap” visitors on its site. Even if you want to use Facebook reflectively you almost have to pry your visitors away from the service with a crowbar because they are inundated with updates, advertising, and cross-promotional links. Facebook has taken “Website stickiness” to levels that even Jakob Nielsen never imagined.
Google+ attempted to address some of these issues (although its asyncronicity is annoyingly as bad as Facebook’s). By making the Plus pages crawlable Google apparently hoped that businesses would set up a lot of promotional pages (but then slapping down promotional pages at the same time has sent a mixed message). Like Facebook pages, Google+ pages can be customized and made to look like “Websites”. Some marketers even shut down their blogs so that they could write only on Google+.
You stop reflecting when you make Facebook or Google+ your primary outreach channel. Both services are hybrid email/forum discussion platforms with some bells and whistles; they are nothing more than hybrid email/forum discussion platforms with some bells and whistles. As such one would think people would use them for email and discussion, and in fact a subset of users of both services do exactly that.
The problem is that these services are too public for real email discussions (yes, you can send “private” messages) and they are too private for real forum discussions (yes, you can create “forums” in both services). Any service that requires you to log in to see the content is semi-private and therefore severely restricts the potential exposure it offers your content.
Advertising or promoting your business, products, and services through Facebook or Google+ is like being the featured speaker at your local country club. You may have a nice lunch crowd and they may even be influencers but you’re still only presenting to a small audience. These services throw a lot of numbers around: 800 million users, 200 million “active accounts”. These numbers are meaningless because no one actually reaches all those people (and I would estimate that up to half of all Facebook accounts are duplicate, discontinued, or “promotional”).
In real world metrics most people (and companies) trying to use Facebook and Google+ to build audience share are reaching fewer people than they do through their Websites. And while that is perfectly fine, investing an inordinate amount of time and resources in creating and managing Facebook and Google+ content and communities is a very inefficient approach to reflective marketing.
If the majority of your Facebook or Google+ visits stay on your Facebook and Google+ pages, then driving more traffic to those services is helping them more than it is helping you. In the cold-hearted world of marketing metrics, your objective is to draw visitors AWAY from Facebook and Google+ — not to help inflate the numbers those advertising networks can claim. If you’re going to spend money to build audience share you want the majority of the new audience to pay attention to YOUR Website, not someone else’s.
Reflective Marketing demands an efficient ratio of resources-to-payoffs because ultimately it is not an efficient primary outreach channel. You’ll only ever see a fraction of the visitors leap over to your Website. Hence, you need to plan accordingly and either shut down your Website (not a good idea in my opinion because you’ll lose control over your content) or you need to set clear limits on how much you’ll rely on Facebook and Google+.
The money is not in social media and may never be there. Your marketing objectives for social media should be focused on channeling traffic to your Websites because you can rest assured that the way we use social media ensures that Websites send plenty of traffic to social media services. There is no quid pro quo in this exchange and that imbalance adds significant unproductive cost to your marketing efforts.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
How Long Does It Take Google to Credit A Website with Links?
Natural Backlink Profile: Endless Ways to Build One
Website Not On Google? Why Some Internal Pages Aren't Indexed
RankBrain and Neural Matching: What Is the Difference?
Follow Reflective Dynamics |
Click here to follow Reflective Dynamics on Twitter: @refdynamics. Click here to follow SEO Theory on Twitter: @seo_theory. Reflective Dynamics' RSS Feed (summaries only) |