When did Facebook become an official site & is it replacing web pages? If so, why? Is it easier to update than a webpage? Better way to gather data on you?
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen:
[ul]
[li]A website for a brand of alcohol (one of many owned by a major spirits company) that does nothing but drive you to their Facebook page. [/li] - Click on the link at the top of the webpage for **Find **& it drives you to a section that states “Find <brand of booze> near you on Facebook”
Want to know what **flavors **we sell - go to our Facebook page
Want recipes? - go to our Facebook page
[li]The local chapter of a major (top 10 US) charity is having a fundraising event. When I went to the chapter’s website to find out the details, like date/time & cost I had to “visit (our) Facebook page”.[/li][li]A lawn sign that said “Support <name of local, volunteer> Ambulance, Like us on Facebook”. Liking them does not support them, making donations does. They have a website, which I just looked at; it doesn’t look like it’s been updated in a few years.[/li][li]Some sites/apps, like Tinder, only let you sign in via Facebook.[/li][/ul]
Especially the alcohol company, they have a marketing budget, (I’m pretty sure) they have marketing staff. They are a professional, for-profit business, not a local volunteer-run orginization. They have a website but yet all it’s doing is driving you to a third-party site that they don’t control. Marketing 101 is where they teach control your message yet they’ve made a big decision to not do that. What’s the blowback if it’s revealed that Facebook is the next victim of a Target-like hack? What are they getting out of you liking them? Demographics info? Are they spamming you with ads once you do like them?
Why do they all have websites that they aren’t using? Is it just a holdover until webpages go away?
Facebook is another web page, ultimately, so I don’t know if it’s “replacing web pages” really, unless you’re talking about silly personal websites, in which case, yes, social media sites like Facebook and MySpace before it pretty much did them in.
I’m sure some people use it for email and communications, but as far as I know, that’s not a really common thing.
I think that it’s used for marketing stuff because it’s free, and it’s also an easy way to get name recognition far and wide for no cost. Say you “like” something on Facebook- other people you know will see that (free advertising), and there’s a certain crowdsourced component- “if 10,134 people like it, it must be pretty good.” type of thing.
It’s not exactly a 3rd party site you have no control over- companies basically set up their Facebook presence how they want it (within the confines of the site), and almost certainly have links to products, etc…
Also for smaller outfits like the volunteer ambulance company, Facebook is probably much easier to deal for whatever volunteer is updating the page. Nobody needs MS Front Page or any other HTML editor- they just go use the built-in stuff. Plus, since Facebook is well-nigh ubiquitous, it’s not like they’re NOT reaching many people by relying on it. I’d guarantee they have instructions or contact info on how to donate, and they’re relying on the crowdsource angle to show their worthiness for donations.
It’s A marketing web page, one of several social media sites and other tools a brand can use in marketing, but I don’t think most companies are going to replace their own site with a FB, at least not web-savvy brands. IMHO, it would be foolish to base your entire business on a social media platform that uses algorithms to display your posts to a limited % of your followers. Plus, just in general, I wouldn’t base a business site on real estate you don’t control. Though it is generally useful to take advantage of having pages on popular, well-regarded sites/subdomains.
FB has plenty of unique uses, as do twitter, Google plus, LinkedIN, Youtube, Wordpress, Blogger, whatever. It’s probably the easiest place to setup contests and giveaways for example, and the advertising program can be pretty effective.
Actually lots of young people who’ve yet to have jobs have minimal experience with e-mail, opting instead for similar services like Facebook messages. Of course, Facebook is pretty far past prime by now, especially with younger people who don’t want to go on Facebook so much just to see what their grandma is up to today. Even still, they’ve been raised with multiple direct electronic communication approaches that to them are as good as e-mail and to us are a lot like e-mail but unnecessarily attached to some Web site.
Try asking a 15 year old and a 35 year old how recently they sent an e-mail. I predict the 15 year old will think for a while and say, “oh yeah, I had to e-mail my great-grandmother photos from Easter because she doesn’t even have facebook” and the 35 year old will be e-mailing a colleague on his iPhone as you ask him.
I don’t know what alcohol you’re talking about, but I can’t imagine any major brand using it as their sole website since that would scream ‘amateur’.
As for the other things, people that need a cheap or temporary website are going to use it because it’s free and easy to set up. There’s no point in buying a domain and learning how to build a website for a charity drive or block party or even their band…and then try to drive traffic to it when they can do it on facebook for free and the traffic is already there, they just have to post it their my wall and get people to like it.
As for Tinder, it ‘only’ lets you sign on through facebook because it uses your pictures, likes and friends to work.
As for the blowback if Facebook is hacked…well, I’ve never given Facebook my credit card information. So the most they’ll get from me is a username and password that I don’t use anywhere else, they’ll get a few hundred pictures and they’ll find out I like Fight Club and Drop Dead Fred.
Hackers want credit card information. I don’t know that there’s a whole lot they can do with marketing data which is what facebook has millions (billions?) of dollars worth of. I’m not even sure that they could sell that on the black market since it might be obvious where it came from if it got stolen and suddenly someone showed up with it one day.
Come to think of it, I wonder if it would be worth it for these big companies to set up copyright type traps. Put in a few thousand fake names, credit card numbers and email address. When their data is breached they have these numbers to watch for and can start the process of figuring out where they came from.
I’ll buy bump’s comment about free marketing from the all of the likes.
Joey P, I actually think it might be a very sophisticated experiment on their part. The parent company has dozens of different brands & probably a few hundred different products, once you count all the various flavors, ages, & proofs of the different spirits. I looked at a few of their other brands & they all have ‘normal’ websites that show me info about all of the different products that brand offers, where to buy, histories, recipes, etc. However, the one brand does nothing but drive me to their FB page.
FB would be an awesome place to hack. If someone could hack FB, think of the successful spearphishing they could do. Hacking FB isn’t their goal, just a step towards their ultimate goal.
What I don’t understand is the first two examples are companies that have websites, which are maintained, yet they are no more useful than a “We’ve moved” sign in the window of a business, directing you to go somewhere else.
I’d also bet that this board skews towards a higher than average number of non-FB users, meaning some of us here, won’t buy that booze or won’t do that charity event.
Probably true, I’ve never had any use for facebook so don’t feel any need to sign up. Over the years the more I know about it the less I want anything to do with it.
I’ve seen close-up the way it gets used for point-scoring, bitching and thoughtless passive- aggressive snipes. More trouble than it is worth if you ask me and I can’t help but feel a little smug that I’m insulated from it.
For double smug-points can I say that I have only ever seen one facebook page and one twitter page and that is because my colleague showed them to me. (he tried to show me a picture that he’d been sent but after he spent five minutes scrolling through “reams of crap”…his words, I lost interest)
So I admit I have an bias and certainly for me any company that relies heavily on facebook or twitter is unlikely to get my business.
For small businesses, it’s a cheap way to have a web presence.
Instead of buying a website and hiring a web designer, you just sign up for free and tell people to visit your Facebook page. It’s also very easy to update, especially since someone in the family is likely to have their own Facebook account and knows how it works.
I think “easy to update” is key for a lot of businesses. Smaller ones, at least. Lots of companies either do not want to put money in to the initial cost of setting up an updateable Web site, and no one in the office can do updates to a static site, so they have to pay someone at the company to whom they initially paid $500 for a site to now update said site every time there’s news.
I’ve heard many times of companies that don’t even have access to update their own sites because the person with all the passwords won’t return their calls. So sites stay un-updated - and wrong - for years.
Another thing about Facebook is that instead of trying to bring people to your site to see your news (I mean, why would you randomly and regularly check the site of your local Italian restaurant?) you are going to where the people are. People are just “milling around” on Facebook and you interject “25% off lunch specials all week!” to all of the people in town who like (“Like”) your restaurant and you just did some pretty amazing targeted marketing right there. For free.
Granted, you can send out email newsletters but that costs money like the site updates do. And people don’t always read emails, and they don’t always get delivered. Facebook updates don’t always get seen (the Pages you Like don’t always show up in your feed, or something…they keep changing it) but still it’s at least very very opt-in.
Anyway, Facebook is cheap and current and targeted. I don’t think it works as a 100% web presence for most businesses, but it’s a great way for a lot of smaller businesses to expand their web capabilities beyond the site they refuse to put money in to anyway.
I don’t use Facebook at all, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think an advantage to the company is that people who visit their Facebook page aren’t anonymous. I think something of the visitor’s profile is provided to the company. On the other hand, I can visit a company’s website without much, if any, information about me flowing to them.
And I agree that it’s annoying if the only or preferred site for a company is on Facebook.
I think the main driver is that a person’s Likes are visible to that person’s friends, often people with similar tastes. So even if the company doesn’t collect individual information from its “Likers”, its image is being spread, in a positive way, to people who may care about the product.
Let’s take an alcoholic beverage, call it Daniel Jack’s Whiskey. Alice clicks on the Like button for Daniel Jack’s because she really thinks it’s the best.
Her friend Bob, who has similar tastes and has shared quite a few drinks with Alice in the past, sees that Alice has Liked Daniel Jack’s. He decides that it makes Alice look cooler, so he decides to Like it as well.
Then Claire, Bob’s coworker and semi-friend, sees that Bob is Liking Daniel Jack’s. She only drinks chardonnay, but seeing that Bob endorses Daniel Jack’s somehow makes it more acceptable to her, even on a subconscious level.
Evan, who has never heard of Daniel Jack’s, sees an ad at a bus stop featuring some sexy person and visits their Facebook page. He sees that 658239 people have Liked it, including his distant friends Felix, Gaëlle and Hector. That’s positive.
This quickly becomes an entire network of semi-passive endorsement for the product. The company has just gained mindshare in the greater public at very little cost.
If they relied on their own Web site, it would not spread nearly as fast. They would have to offer huge gifts, like a trip to the Super Bowl, to gain as much mindshare.
I don’t believe they get much information (other than anonymous demographic data) unless you Like or Join or whatever.
I’d still say it’s mostly about convenience and cost. A web page is not always worth the cost, especially to local businesses that deal with primarily local concerns. For them, Facebook has a better cost/benefit ratio than their own website.
About the only reason I ever look online for a local business is to get a contact number or email (which is already available in Google maps.) The exception are call in or carry out restaurants, which will have a menu, and the few stores that will have coupons. And my psychologist has a printable intake form you can fill out.
There’s lots and lots of stuff here to be addressed,
but in the interests of full disclosure - my business is content marketing, facebook management and website design, so my views may well be biased.
First up - the reason for directing people to Facebook is that it is faster and easier to manage than a website. Any body can point and click and do an update. You can advertise if you want to also.
Also - as already mentioned, the virality is important - if you post (for example) 25% off lunch at “Great Chili Crab restaurant” a user on facebook can “share” that to his friends page with the message “wanna go?” - no copying, pasting or anything else needed.
If your brand is something that is very social (i.e - has a lot of events) facebook has a built in “event app” that can track things like RSVP, update all RSVP to updates etc without the need to manage a mailing list.
The drawback, to me anyway - a facebook page is not as easy to navigate if you have multiple pages or products. Balancing this - IF you only have one product - all you need is an “about us” page - and then regular news about what you are doing.
In the example given of an “alcohol brand” - I would think Facebook would be ideal. Single product, keep people up to date of when the next party is, and little else - what else do they need?