More and more companies nowadays tend to use Facebook as a means of creating an online presence and promote their business than creating a website. This is a result of the global recession and the dissemination of social media, which provide such services for FREE! But is it the best solution when it comes to create an online presence and promote your business?
Here are some findings and useful piece of information someone has to go through when considering online presence and its benefits and costs.
Stand-alone Website
Some of the many benefits of a stand-alone website are given in this section:
Unlimited possibilities for the amount and type of information you provide and the overall feel you want to portray. You can give your website the layout you want, using a CMS you can switch to another template instantly and benefit from all the available open source tools and applications on the web like e-commerce etc.
SEO related issues. SEO likes websites and websites are SEO friendly. You can apply search engine optimization techniques on a website using a domain name and website.
With SEO comes also Marketing! You can increase your visibility when being listed on popular search engines and transfer your potential visitors and finally your customers to your website.
Facebook Page
Facebook has evolved over the years and now provides such services as page creation which is similar to a website, allowing for a great deal of customization using a number of tools. Some companies either go directly for a Facebook page or redirect their website to the Facebook page.
There are some advantages of this strategy, like the following ones:
Its FREE! Anyone can crate a Facebook page and direct its traffic over to this page.
No coding requirements! Its quite simple for anyone to create a page, customize this page, drop some photos, add some text, give an email address and a location and this is it!
However, there are also some disadvantages as described below:
Pages rely totally on Facebook. Facebook is not going to ask you for a change in its user interface that might affect your page layout. One day you wake up and realize that your page is forced to change its layout according to Facebook’s demands without any chance of getting away of these changes.
Competitor’s advertisement. Just as Facebook places advertisement randomly, you may end up having your page accompanied with a competitor advertisement and you simply can’t do anything about this embarrassing fact.
Conclusion
To sum up, Facebook is in fact a great and very successful tool that meant to revolutionize the whole social media concept. When you are in the middle of making a decision about your online presence keep in mind that the best strategy is a combination of a website coupled with a Facebook page!