Why Facebook is Bad for Business
Or perhaps, more aptly, Why Facebook is Hurting your Blog.
The theory goes something like such: you’re on Facebook, your friends are on Facebook, they see your stuff, it goes viral, you’re a superstar, right? Millions of people flock to your blog and the next thing you know you can quit your day job and people will pay you to write about how you just don’t think you’re going to buy into macrobiotics anymore.
Except, that has only happened to like two people, and it’s because they’ve got a Leprechaun chained up in the basement.
In reality, if you’re blogging for business, their are two things you are most likely to get out of it.
- Better Search Engine Placement
- Repeat Visitors
Even if your content isn’t all that great, you can get the first of those benefits. If you’re writing mediocre content but publishing it on a regular basis, and it’s relevant to your actual business, even in the slightest, Google will look at you and think, “Dang, bud, you sure are putting out a lot of content.” As long as that content is original, you go girl, good on you.
Take my personal blog for example. I’ve been writing on there since the month of May in the year 2004. That’s a long time for a single blog to be still going. There are billions upon trillions of blogs out there, right? Most were abandoned some time in 2005, nearly the rest are SPAM, but a few have been going strong for years. Those that have, well, they get respect from Google.
Even if you haven’t been writing for a decade, if you’re regularly contributing information to the web, Google will love you for it.
The latter, repeat visitors, will require your content to actually be good. That’s an entirely different topic. What we’re here to discuss today is the effect Facebook has had on your business.
Remember the last time NPR was on and you heard that gun nut bitching about how if Obama tries to take away his rocket launcher he’ll blow him all the way back to Muslim? It got you all fired up and whatnot, right? Instead of writing about it on your blog, though, you decided to post it to Facebook. Facebook now got a bit more content, your website? Nothing.
In a more practical situation, remember the last time you decided to share a link to [insert website relative to your business/customers/industry]? You clicked a few buttons, and bam, there it was on Facebook for all of your friends to see on your timeline. Pretty swell, I know, look at that, your ex-girlfriend Tina just liked it. Oh, your mom shared it with her cooking class. Weird.
Instead, you could have posted a short paragraph with the link on your blog. Now you’ve got a bit more content. Now you’re reaching out to Google and saying, “Yeah, forget FB, let’s you and I be friends again.”
I’d rather be on good terms with my placement in Google’s search engine results than have 21,007 likes on Facebook any day. Except Sunday, I take those for myself.
Up Next: Browserstack vs. CrossBrowserTesting