Am I missing something here with Facebook?
 

Ok, I never use FB and really have no desire to do so either. However I've noticed over the last year or so on the radio every other company advertising always tries to send people to their face book page, instead of their own websites.

Then I see websites doing the same thing, trying to send users to their FB or twitter page. LOL am I missing something here because I thought you were supposed to do just the opposite and use FB to send people to your own website.

I mean seriously who were the marketing geniuses whom decided it's best to advertise for some other company's website rather than their own?

Obviously I'm talking mainstream outside of porn..but I just don't get it.

It's much easier to reach your (potential) customers on Facebook. Get them to Like your FB page and you can send them Promo's etc.

When they just visit your website they might not come back or forget about it. When you have them on FB you can keep 'spamming' them.

People use Facebook pages like they used to use Geocities. Rather than make a website about your business, just make a Facebook page that has all your business information and forget about managing a website.

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It's a good way to maintain a relationship with your customers and keep them updated on new stuff. Liking a FB page is like subscribing to a newsletter.

the webpage is good as a front-end impression of the company, but generally if you like their page and interact on it, it gets into your news feed eventually, thus spreading the word. It is all for marketing. Webpage is for the brand, FB/twitter page for the buzz.

Plus no hosting, domain, upkeep bills etc.

It's gotta be great for a lot of tech illiterate businesses out there, even they can setup a Facebook page and engage with their customers

lots of morons out there who don't know the net beyond facebook i guess. i think its a fad (directing people to a facebook page) that will die out though. why give a platform free advertising?

i was thinking this same thing as well....they put facebook all over their stuff but not their own sites....i get that people go to facebook each day.
i however dont click anything on there, i would rather go to someones real website.
i might not be the average inet customer though as well.

I know what you mean!! I just don't get it. EVERY Ad, Every sign, every commercial has FACEBOOK in it.

Facebook is the new Internet. People don't connect to the Internet any more, they connect to Facebook. They don't surf the web, they FRIEND and LIKE.

I confuze.

No, the company's website and blog is the formal communications medium. Facebook, Twitter, etc. are your informal communications medium. They are used differently.

If as a webmaster you don't actively USE facebook to understand the surfer, you must be stupid or something. :1orglaugh

I just lol haha

I agree with both of you entirely but as marketeers it's important to understand this massive shift that's happened in the last few years.

As you said ********** Facebook is the internet for a lot of people now :disgust

If you can think outside the box their is a lot of money in advertising on Facebook :pimp

this sums your question answer

Facebook is an opportunity missed if you're not using it correctly.

I have a stack of video tutorials on using Facebook for Internet Marketing and more being made, if you're interested in accessing them hit me up, I wont paste the link here.

There is a whole range of reasons why you need a strong facebook presence.
Some of those have already been mentioned. One of the main reasons is that Bing and Google use Data from Facebook to rank your website in the serps. A strong facebook presence gives you better serps.
With that said, you need to understand the trend here...facebook is moving towards you intergrating your website in facebook so you can sell products direct via facebook. Keep in mind Bing is a part owner of Facebook, and Bing Yahoo, AOL and facebook are acting as a team now. Google is being sidelined.
Things are changing fast and having a strong Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin profile is absolutly essential.
I had one website in mainstream that was selling nothing and no traffic....I was about to close it down when I started a strong campaign via facebook, twitter and linkedin....that website now pulls in over $2,000 a month in income from those three social networks.

You got an email address AK? Any new method I'm happy to learn :thumbsup

I have made a post to my blog today which makes available a really good video on whether social media is worth pursuing.

I can contacted via my blog.

Remember myspace? yep same shit now nobody promotes them... funny

:thumbsup There you go.

I've said it a hundred times on here. Social networking ruined the internet!

It's not as fun as it used to be. Everyone is too busy updating their shitty fucking status, than to actually create something new... :2 cents:

agree completely with you on that, the way things are going makes me almost want to quit, the net had so much potential and instead it is going to complete shit :2 cents:

This, more or less.

Do people really look up the Facebook page of their favorite products?

Are people really that fucking bored that they have to friend their favorite brand of sneakers?

A local news station was having a contest and if they would pick people who liked them on Facebook at random and give out laptops and what not. I figured sure, why not? Until every day my Facebook page was spammed with their news crap.

Facebook is a waste. It's taken the creativity out of the Internet. Everyone is on facebook but no one has their own webpage any more.

I'll have to let James Schramko know that the huge money a year he makes from Facebook marketing must be his imagination playing tricks on him :1orglaugh

Cheers AK, I'll check it out later

It's just showing off, "Look what's going on in my life!"

Except most people have repetitive boring lives and end up sharing stupid pointless information with 400 - 500 "friends" who don't give a shit because most of those "friends" consist of people they've met once in their life but had to add them to Facebook to seem more popular, when in real life their true friend count is about 5 - 10 :2 cents:

Yes they do. And they are doing to hear about updates and discounts/offers.

I run a Facebook page for a Cupcake shop I have a small stake in. We have almost 15000 followers and have spent $0 on advertising in the 2 years we've been open.

Facebook has been key to us closing in on close to $500k in sales this year, well that and the cupcakes are fucking amazing.

Im surprised to read so much ignorance towards Facebook marketing.

Embrace what the people want and use.

What is the old adage, "Adapt or Die"?

As usual, Gabe shows himself to be a true thinker and he's right on the money here.

they want to add them as a friend or follow their pages so they can legally spam your account and all your (virtual) "friends" legally and for free

A good marketing campaign will get you to their page to like it and then use the page to move you onto their site.

You'll then seeing everything (in your stream) they post on their page going forward.

Whether you love it or hate it, use it! Myspace was seen on many a company advertising at one time, now facebook. Use it until the next fad comes along, and then use that too. Whenever someone presses the like button or comments on a post, they are advertising your company to all of their friends, for free!

Here's how pages work...

When someone "likes" your page, from there on they see all of your updates in their news feed, as if they were a friend of yours. You use this to market directly to them.

The initial "like" also shows to all of their friends in their news feeds, so if your page has an interesting enough name, they check it out, then possibly "like" it too, which their friends see, and so on...

Facebook is basically a walled garden for idiots who don't know better, marketers are pointing people there because that's where they hang. :)

Does make you wonder what happens if their FB account gets deleted for a ToS violation...

when a surfer likes your page it advertises that to all their friends and so on .... it reiterates exponentially.

if you are in adult and are not doing mainstream marketing you might as well be stuck in the age of geocities.

You missed the point entirely.. It's one thing to actively use social networking to send traffic to where ever you want to send it. It's a completely different thing to send your traffic to a facebook page rather than your own site which you have full control of.

If you don't understand the difference I lol @ you.. Besides that I don't do affiliate sales anymore and what I do requires very little new customers as I'm happy with what I have ATM, so I have zero need to market on social network sites.

I just think it's silly to send traffic to a FB page that you don't completely control, in hopes to get them to go to your site, when instead you could have skipped the middle man and sent them right to your own site.

I do not mention my facebook page on my site. But facebook does drive an immense amount of traffic to my site and my type-in subscriptions have jumped up a lot since putting it into play.

Yea see that's typical usage of social media outlets to gain traffic to your own sites. Yet what I've been seeing a lot of over the last year is people just sending straight to a FB page then hopefully back to their own site, which just seems senseless to me because they are sending their traffic to site filled with leaks that they can't control. Not to mention missing perfect opportunity to brand their own website.

Seems to me it's just a lot of companies jumping on a bandwagon because the other guys are doing it vs really thinking about what they are doing.