A few days ago, USA Today published More Companies Quit Blogging, Go With FaceBook Instead. Huh? I don’t get it. You know I don’t get it, especially if you read this 2009 post about why a blog adds more long term valuable to your business than a FaceBook Page could ever add.
Sure, it takes less time to publish a short FaceBook status update (or 140 characters in the case of Twitter) than it does to publish 140 words. But since when did less time mean more value? If you want to add more value to your business, so you can add more value to your customers’s experience, so you can increase the value of your business, the last thing you want to do is ditch your blog for FaceBook
Don’t Abdicate Your Throne
How many times have you surrendered control of your community engagement to FaceBook, only to have FaceBook rock your world by doing things like:
- Turning your “fans” into “likers” (remember how awkward that was?)
- Sending your group page to Siberia
- Eliminating the reviews tab (remember those? I wrote about them in 3 Really Simple Ways To Spruce Up Your FaceBook Fan Page)
- Switching to to TimeLine (I wrote about that in What Facebook’s New Changes Mean For Small Businesses
- And don’t get me started on FaceBook’s ever-evolving privacy issues and what your customers think about them.
And that’s a very short list.
There’s little doubt that each of those changes was good for FaceBook. But were they good for your business? And even if they were, does it make any sense to turn over your community engagement to a third party that does not have your business’s best interests at heart?
I think not.
More People Are Reading Blogs …
… so … why would you stop blogging?
Don’t miss this. While the USA Today article highlights a decrease in the number of businesses with a blog, it fails to mention recent data from emarketer showing that the percentage of web surfers reading blogs rose from 45% in 2008 to 53.5% in 2011.
Did you catch that?
Companies that ditch their blogs are doing so at a time when the number of people reading blogs is increasing. Why would anyone do that?
Don’t Delegate Your Community To FaceBook (or Twitter or … Anyone)
FaceBook is great, and I use it almost every day at the Indie Business Fans Page. I love connecting with you there (and on Twitter and other places). But FaceBook is not looking out for my business. And it’s not looking out for yours either.
If you abandon your blog, or neglect to maintain the one you have, you are literally making it harder for people to find you, trust you, learn about your products, and ultimately, buy your products.
More and more, people are looking to blogs to find the information they need to do everything from choosing health and beauty products to learning how to change a tire.
Whether you want to grow big or grow small, your customers and prospects will be looking to you for the information they need to make wise buying decisions. They will be looking to trust you, and to be able to rely on you as a leader in your field.
What better way to showcase your credibility than to host a blog that you own, manage, and control? What better way to show customers, prospects, media representatives, colleagues, and friends that you are investing real resources in your brand and not relying solely on free services like FaceBook and Twitter to garner attention and sell your products?
A blog is simple, very low cost, easy to manage, and free.
Get one and use it. And don’t ditch the one you have.
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By the way, if you’re an IBN member, you probably could use some help developing an easy, “plug-and-play” blogging format so you can blog more frequently without unnecessarily diminishing the time you need to make your products. That’s why dM is hosting
Question: Are you going to keep your blog (or start or re-start one)? Why or why not?
dM, it’s interesting that you’re talking about this because I’ve gone around and around about this lately! I have had a blog for about 5 years and for three of those years I averaged 3 or 4 posts/week. I enjoyed it but it took a tremendous amount of time to create the content. I use Blogger so yes, my blog has always been “free” but to me it has never felt simple or easy to manage. This year I have cut the number of posts down by almost half and have spent some of that time savings at Facebook and other places online. That has worked well for me, particularly the time at Facebook.
I’ve put too much into my blog to ever give it up entirely, but it feels like business owners have to be where their customers are, and hundreds of mine are already at Facebook. I’ve also found new customers there in a way that never happened with my blog. I do find the constant Facebook changes challenging, but it seems to allow connection in a way that my blog never has. (I know other people have different experiences with their blogs, this is just my observation.) I will continue to blog to educate my customers and to build trust, but Facebook (and other social media sites) offer a really unique opportunity to connect with customers and potential customers, so I hope to be able to balance both!
Thanks for your comments, Emily! I’m so glad that you are finding success on FaceBook. My post definitely does not suggest giving up a FaceBook Page! When I think about the future and how many more people are continuing to look to blogs for information, it is a smart business decision you are making to maintain both a blog and a FaceBook Page.
Another thing that occurs to me is that we cannot easily measure how much more credibility we have on FaceBook because we have a branded blog. I do think the two tie together nicely in that way, as two separate prongs supporting a brand. Kind of like the sum of the whole is greater than its parts. With all those blog posts you’ve published, you have a storehouse of content you can use over and over again on FaceBook and elsewhere to showcase your expertise and build on existing trust and credibility. Plus the value of your business is even greater now that you have so much intellectual property that you own and control — you never know what opportunities will come your way where all that juicy content is concerned.
Thanks again!
A blog and a Facebook page do two totally different things, so giving up a blog in favor of a Facebook page (or even the other way around) would have to be a very careful decision. Facebook gives us the opportunity to share photos and short ideas, as well as share & network with our teachers & students, while on a blog we can develop our thoughts more and give our students some great information they can refer back to any time they want. Hopefully we’ll grow to be just as regular bloggers as Emily, below – that’s definitely a challenge we’re constantly working on!