How To Grow Your Company: Don’t Use Facebook
An easy tip to give, a hard one to follow
Yes, it is that simple: if you’re a company, organization, business or freelancer, you’re trying to sell a product or you’re just trying to start a community (like a rock band or a group of tree huggers) don’t use Facebook. Please don’t do it.
Why? The reasons are simple but powerful: you can’t control the communication. Despite it being a communication channel/social network (emphasis on network)/community (very debatable), it points into the other direction: filtering information, needing to pay for content to be seen, very distracting by other things like games, Ads (which used to be content, remember?), donate buttons, Apps, settings, etc.
Facebook power resides in the fact it’s a network. But the moment you lose your own self-built network, it loses all its purpose. It’s extremely counterproductive and dangerous.
Maybe you’ll tell me “But everyone’s on Facebook!”. And it may be true — I’m not on Facebook, by the way — but that doesn’t mean it is the right channel for everyone and everything.
It’s quite simple:
- You can’t see exactly who has liked your Facebook Page. Well, you actually can, but it’s not straight forward. Some users are hidden because they chose too. You need to go to a list of “users to block”.
- If you’re a Page (which means you’re some kind of organization), you can’t send personal messages to people, unless they message you.
- You are treated in an inferior way on Facebook algorithm, which means…
- You have zero guarantee that your content will be seen by your followers in a natural way, which means…
- You need to pay to “promote” your content, which leads to the worst trap of all…
- The biggest traps of all: if you pay to promote your content, Facebook will put you in front of people that is willing to Like your Page. But once that happened, those people also liked more pages and you become a smaller percentage in their liked rack. So the next time you share content, Facebook will put content in a small percentage of your followers, and since that people now follow too much content, it’s less probable that it will appear in front on them and once it appears, they’re less willing to interact with it. Therefore, your content will rank even worse for their algorithm. Facebook will say “Oh, so, nobody liked this thing? Ok, let’s rank this content and this page as bad content”.
I find this last point really disappointing from a platform that was once very innovative and that promised the future of communication. Small restaurants, NGOs, citizen collectives, local rock bands and every other organization are always struggling printing flyers and promoting their Facebook Page at meetings just to send everyone into a system that’s not loyal to the process of communication.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a good directory for people, but other than that it doesn’t work that well for businesses and small organizations. It’s a dead end. It’s a network that is attacking itself.
Your next best option
Here’s where you ask:
“Ok, Rodrigo, you’re such a smarty pants. But if I shouldn't use Facebook, then, what should I do?”
And I’m like:
“Uh, what about start a community? Your own community.”
And you’re like:
“A community? But I don’t know where to start. Where do I find that people? And by the way, what does a community means?”
And I’m like:
“I don’t fucking know, that’s your job! It’s your product/company/group/rock band/football team/fundrising campaign/etc.”
And you’re like:
“You don’t have to be so rude -_-”
And I’m like:
“Well, you can start talking to real people where they hang out.”
I personally don’t use Facebook. It just doesn’t add any value to my life. If I want to stay in touch with people? What about sending a personal email, making a phonecall or just appearing at their house? Oh, maybe you’ll ask what about ex-classmates from elementary school? I just don’t care. And you shouldn’t too. There’s a reason why you’ve stopped talking to them on first place.
Tools to build an audience
So, what can you actually do to communicate? If you want to start a community in your city, use Meetup for small random groups — chess fans, football clubs, programming communities, entrepreneur moms — . There’s Tumblr for sharing multimedia content (imges, video, vines, inspiration) and Snapchat for personal random comunication, specially for young audiences. Vine & Periscope are quite interesting tools for news and broadcasting real-time information. Everything could be shared on top of Twitter as the broadcasting channel by definition. If you’re a writer or you just want to share your opinion — or even for marketing communicationg, about how’ve been working on your product or the milestones of your organization — Medium has the best writing/reading network. YouTube obviously for video. If you’re a rock-band, just focus on Soundcloud or even Bandcamp.
Even blogs and forums works better than Facebook to find high-engaged consumers and costumers. Yes, that sounds like 2003 but even that’s better than Facebook.
So go out and talk to people, look at what they do, where do they spend the time, what do they read, watch and consume. Find a more direct way to communicate and do it. It’s not that hard.
Thanks.
If you liked this post, you can clic “Recommend” at the bottom of the post. Oh, you didn’t like it because you actually love Facbeook? Well, fuck off. Just kiddin’, love you.
I’m Rodrigo Tello, a designer and coder from Mexico. You can find more about me at my website rodrigotello.me
