Why Facebook is not enough for businesses…

While Facebook has predominately become the focus of smart phones, smart folks and smart marketers, I don’t find it all that smart for entrepreneurs. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should delete your account right now, just consider finishing this sentence…While Facebook is no doubt a legitimate medium for businesses looking to attract socialites, if you’re not in the business of shotgun marketing consider these facts:

• Not everyone in the world is on Facebook, so you could be instantly removing a demographic from your potential client base.
• The simplicity and open nature of Facebook makes it much easier for questionable businesses to present themselves as legitimate establishments without the hassle of actually being a legitimate business that gets indexed and properly ranked by major search engines.
• Friends can be bought and sold (not literally) on Facebook, making for unrealistic friend counts and resulting in businesses that look much more established than they actually are.
• Brand identity is something that you will severely lack if you don’t happen to utilize the same blue as Facebook. The styling options for businesses on Facebook, be it pages or personal are basically non-existent.
• Websites came first, Facebook is just a website that provides limited option websites to anyone with the ability to complete a reCaptcha field. You have no corporate identity, no identifying marks, and no real presence.

With that said, I praise Facebook, for giving the slight ability of making a ‘personal’ page to anyone with the ability to stumble into the local library. For the average social enthusiast its perfect, but for an entrepreneur or business owner its substitution for a website is the equivalent of posting your brochure on a billboard. Facebook should be the catalyst for promoting your website, the amount of plugins available is practically overwhelming. If your idea of farming on Facebook is more about finding potential clients as opposed to rooting carrots or lentils or whatever it is, then start plugging for yourself. If you are a legitimate specialist in your field then people want to read what you have to say. You are at the forefront of woodstove technology? People want to know your pellet prowess, preach it, post it, blog it, f’ing ink it on the bottom of your shoe and go for a walk.

Facebook is a tool, but i consider it like a crescent wrench that is stuck wide open. It only works for minimal amount of nuts, and if you could adjust it, it would work alot better.