Your Website Should Be Your Foundation, Not Facebook
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Whether you’re a business owner or an agency that creates websites for businesses, it’s time to start treating websites with the respect they deserve.
One if the biggest lessons that we should be learning from the recent Facebook outage is to not have all your eggs in one basket. If you’re customers can’t reach you or access alternate contact methods, you’re losing money. Once there’s a problem with your social media presence, it’s too late to act.
Control Your Branding and Presence
If you’re using a social networking platform as your primary means of promotion and interaction, you are not in control. When that platform changes their policies and procedures, it could negatively affect your business. We’ve seen this happen with every platform over the years, because their policies are about making them money and you are just free content to them.
You Have Choices, Not Choice
No one is saying that you shouldn’t be on all of the appropriate social media platforms to promote your business. You should be using every platform to promote your business that you can. Create a great website and by all means, use every other opportunity to get the word out.
As each platform has its own unique purpose and community, always make sure that you’re posts are appropriate for that platform. Posting the exact same thing to every social network is the easy way to go, but you can get better results by taking the time to craft your posts for the network.
Build a Strong Foundation without Facebook
Creating a good strong foundation means that your website is a stand alone promotional tool that doesn’t rely on other services. When you control every aspect of your website you can’t be knocked offline or censored by other parties that do not have the same motivations as you.
A strong foundation can and should be used for the content that you use to share on social media.
Driving the Traffic FROM Facebook
When you create content, it should go on your website first. All of your great content can be shared to any and all of the current social media platforms with a link directly to your website.
If you copy the link to your post/content it’s easy to paste that link directly into a post on Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other platforms you’re using. In most cases the platform will grab the featured image and a short snippet from the content and use it as part of your post. Make sure that you add some additional text that’s appropriate for the platform.
When people click on your post, they’ll be taken to your website, where you control the experience. This is exactly what you want. Take the people away from Facebook and away from all of the other distractions that don’t benefit you. Once someone is on your website, you choose the experience that they have.