Owning a Facebook Page over a Website

There has been quite a debate in the online marketing world around the topic of which tools or platforms to use to promote your business now that we’re in a world where Facebook has become ubiquitous.

You’ve probably seen it in the past year that more and more businesses, large and small, have a presence on Facebook through Facebook “Pages” (previously called Fan Pages). Most noticeable of course are the businesses your friends and contacts are involved with, and that they “Like”.

In the context of a difficult economy or just by being sensitive about your marketing resources (time and money), the following question then becomes very legitimate: does it still make sense to have a website or should I only have a Facebook Page to promote my business?

Let’s look at the pros and cons of owning a Facebook Page instead of a website.

Pros of only owning a Facebook Page:

• It’s free.
• It’s fairly easy and doesn’t take a lot of time to setup.
• Your setup options are limited which makes it easy to launch as you don’t have to pick among dozens of features.
• It’s very easy to promote as you can start by sending a message to all your friends with just a couple of clicks.
• You can see the feedback from your promotions by how many people will “Like” your Page and leave comments on your “Wall”.
• You can directly reach your followers by posting messages directly on their “Wall” or sending them a Facebook message.
• Facebook makes it really easy to advertise your Page and precisely target your audience on Facebook (at a cost of course).
• Analytics are built in and you get traffic reports every week, no need to set anything up.

Cons of only owning a Facebook Page:

• You audience has to be on Facebook and has to “Like” your page to automatically benefit from the information you publish. This leaves out potential customers who aren’t on Facebook at all, who just casually use Facebook or who don’t want to “Like” pages and expose their personal informal (more than you think). Depending on your product or services, you could be missing the bulk of your target audience by only being on Facebook.
• Having a long list of friends to promote to doesn’t mean that they will be your target audience, it’s actually likely that they won’t be. This means that you will still have to advertise your Facebook page.
• The look and feel of your Page is very standard and even though you can brand the page, it’s hard to visually stand out. There are some very creative Facebook Page designs but you’ll have to hire professional help.
• In order to add more complex features (or Apps) to your page, you might have to learn a programming language (Facebook Markup Language – FBML). For example, setting up a contest on your page will require some technical skills.
• Even though Facebook does register your Facebook Page on major search engines, you’re likely not to be well ranked on keywords relevant to your business. Your brand name will come up probably first on Google for example but type in keywords people would use to find your business by topic and you probably won’t show up on the first few pages.
• You have limited options and depend on Facebook to integrate the latest technology that would help you promote your Page (think RSS feeds for example). If you want to do anything more complex than displaying your business information you will still require technical expertise. Think: filling in a form, using a shopping cart, registering to a Newsletter, etc.
• You totally depend on Facebook to promote your business. In other words, Facebook can change the rules anytime without you being able to do anything about it. Think about how many times Facebook has changed your profile page and how you (and your friends) felt about it. That’s the potential cost of Free.

My recommendation: leverage Facebook Tools, don’t lose your identity to them.

Unless you have very limited resources, very little time for marketing and you think that the bulk of your Facebook friends would be potential customers and could themselves influence a decent percentage of their friends to also “Like” your page and ultimately buy your products or services, I would not advise to exclusively own a Facebook Page and no website.

As with any other marketing tool or tactic, I don’t believe in the “silver bullet” approach. I believe in leveraging all available tools to boost your brand. I also believe in owning your brand and not outsourcing it to a 3rd party platform, however popular it is.

This means that I strongly believe that you should own your domain name and a website (as simple as it might be at first). There are free online services (such as WordPress.com for example) that enable you to create your website on the fly for free (hosting and technology) and charge a small fee for linking it to your domain name.

I also strongly believe in making your brand as accessible as possible to the world. In other words, the World Wide Web is your oyster, not Facebook’s realm alone.

Use all the resources available to grow your brand and product awareness. Facebook offers a range of tools to integrate the Facebook experience to your website (read more here: http://developers.facebook.com). Of course, I do recommend having a Facebook Page on top of having a website.

Also don’t stop at Facebook, you can leverage any social media service to drive traffic and convert leads on a platform you own (think  about integrating with Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.). This is possible only if you own your own piece of real estate on the Web.