Small businesses: Forget Facebook

While it’s great to offload comments to social media and it’s great to engage your users on social media, I think Facebook is a tremendous waste of energy.

I know there are success stories regarding Facebook. Facebook surely wants you to hear them. But the biggest problem with Facebook is their architecture — they don’t want their users to leave Facebook. Nor do they want all your followers to see all of your posts.

You may not realize this but if you have a company “page” on Facebook with 100 followers (just an example number), only 20 of those followers may see a post from you. Sometimes, far less. Even when your customers and users have explicitly “Liked” your page, Facebook won’t put your posts in their news feeds. So having 10,000 followers on Facebook means far, far less than having 10,000 followers on Twitter.

This is terrible news for businesses who need control over their user engagement.

Facebook has truly become the AOL of the 21st century. For many people it IS the web. I know that sounds like a reason to use it. But I see that as evidence not to bother with it. It is so hard to get a user off Facebook and convert on another site that you might as well not bother.

I have never had success for myself or clients getting users to follow a conversion funnel away from Facebook. So set up a company page, connect it to Buffer (more on that later), and then forget about it.

Establish an outpost, send content there, check in every week, but don’t waste any energy on it.

The success stories are much more rare than you’ve been led to believe. Don’t spend time trying to figure out how to make Facebook work for you. Let’s all just wait until Facebook figures out how to send traffic to our sites.

“Seriously, do not start down to the path to a website for your small business until you read Todd A’s book.” — Amazon review

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