Facebook not the platform for business we thought it would be
For a while now I have been questioning the value of Facebook as a marketing platform for business. Their constant changes of what shows in the news feed and changes to business rules have made the platform frustrating.
While it is terrific to get plenty of likes for your Facebook page and there are some who successfully use this to communicate with their customer community, there is a growing community of people concerned with where facebook is headed.
Mark Cuban, Chairman of the Dallas Mavericks and Chairman of HD Net, wrote about this recently at The Huffington Post. He gets to the heart of what Facebook in:
Facebook is what it is. It’s a time waster. That’s not to say we don’t engage — we do. We click, share and comment because it’s mindless and easy. But for some reason Facebook doesn’t seem to want to accept that its best purpose in life is as a huge time-suck platform that we use to keep up with friends, interests and stuff. I think that they are overthinking what their network is all about.
As far as a platform for reaching out to uncover new customers for any of my newsagencies, I am finding Twitter to be a far more useful and less costly platform. I am also able to more easily see the reach of what I put on Twitter than Facebook. That said, I’ll still use Facebook to connect with existing customers. We do live, after all, in a world with more routes to market than ever before.
I mention this today as there are social media experts pitching their service to newsagents, saying they can help you achieve plenty of likes for your newsagency Facebook page. Do your research before you go and give them money to achieve something that may be of questionable value.