Making Websites

Facebook page vs. business website: what’s more important?

Robert Brandl

By Robert

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Millions of brands and businesses actively use social media, and Facebook is an essential component of any social media marketing campaign. But over the last few months, businesses have found a less useful tool.

More ads, less of what users really want to see

Facebook has shifted the goal posts, reducing the visibility of posts in users’ news feed. When you update your Page, as few as 15 per cent of your Facebook fans will actually see your updates unless you pay for a Promoted Post, which can be extremely pricey if you have a high number of fans.

sponsored-facebook
Image: Watch out for the “sponsored” or “promoted post” tags

Their decision to prefer paid content could have significant consequences on the way how users will interact with content that comes from companies. But now back to the initial question: Facebook page vs. business website: what’s more important?

Disadvantages to using Facebook Pages exclusively

  • It’s incredibly difficult to optimize a Facebook page for search engines, and the layout of Facebook Pages is too rigid for proper branding.
  • Facebook may well be popular now, but many other social networks (such as Friendster and Myspace) have been and gone. One day, Facebook may fall out of favour.
  • If your fans move on to another social network, migrating all the content you’ve uploaded to Facebook might be expensive (or impossible).
  • Almost everybody is on the Internet but not everyone is on Facebook. Yes that’s the reality.
  • Because Facebook is a free tool, your business is at the mercy of Facebook when they introduce new changes. Nobody knows what will change next.

On Facebook, you are a user not a customer, and this means you don’t have much right to complain. Facebook answers to its shareholders – not to its users.

Combining the best of two worlds

To be more flexible with the way you publish and promote your content you need your own business website. By creating your own website, you retain control over the look and feel of your business content. You also future-proof your business against Facebook’s ever changing rules and algorithms, and you give your business a better chance of being found in search.

Adding a blog as well as a Facebook page (and/or TwitterGoogle+ and Pinterest) to your business website has some great advantages as it will improve your Google rankings in a very natural way.

How to create a business website?

Many businesses, particularly SMEs, find the idea of creating a website daunting. They expect it to be complicated, time-consuming and expensive. It doesn’t have to be.

Even if you’re not technically-minded, you can create a small business website in a similar fashion as a Facebook page by using a website builder.

Website builders consist of pre-made templates. Drag components onto your site and create all the pages you need within your web browser. And it’s also easy to integrate a blog and your social media accounts so that your website is essentially the central hub for your company.

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And if you have any questions or Feedback just leave a comment!

Image credit: suze / photocase.com

 

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Robert Brandl

Founder and CEO

Hi, my name is Robert Brandl! I used to work in a digital marketing agency where I managed website and email marketing projects. To optimize my client's campaigns, I always had to find the optimal web tools. Tooltester offers this knowledge to you, hopefully saving you endless hours of research.

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