WHAT IF FACEBOOK SHUT DOWN TOMORROW?
How to secure your audience.
Social media is, and should be, a big part of doing business in today’s world. Your business, like most others, probably has a profile on one or more of the large social media platforms - and that’s great!
Social media enables us to easily keep in touch with our customers and find potential future-customers. If utilized correctly, Facebook specifically can be one of the single best tools for your business’s growth and future stability.
But, what if Facebook shut down?
I’m not saying that Facebook will actually shut down, but the trend with social media platforms is that they eventually do get replaced with a new platform and they slowly die out. Remember MySpace? I’m willing to bet that no one you know is still active on that platform. While we know Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, I ask this question because I think it highlights a couple of very important points.
I’m not saying that Facebook will actually shut down, but the trend with social media platforms is that they eventually do get replaced with a new platform and they slowly die out. Remember MySpace? I’m willing to bet that no one you know is still active on that platform. While we know Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, I ask this question because I think it highlights a couple of very important points.
- You do not own your Facebook profile.
Facebook is in full control of everything on it’s platform. The truth is, that if Facebook decides to ban your page or they make significant algorithm changes that make it difficult to interact with your followers it could be a devastating blow to your business. What happens to your audience if this happens? To all of your followers? Well, unless you’ve successfully converted them to an off-Facebook list, they are probably gone forever. - Converting your Facebook audience to an off-Facebook list is easier than it sounds.
One of the best ways to guarantee that you don’t lose access to your audience grown on Facebook, or any social platform, is to secure other ways of communicating with them. Setting up a free account with Mailchimp will allow you to email up to 2,000 contacts per month. The important distinction here is that the email addresses that you collect and use on Mailchimp belong to you, not Facebook or anyone else. If for whatever reason Mailchimp closes in the future, you could easily take that audience list and move to any other email marketing platform and keep it going.
A question that we hear time and time again is ‘How do I get my Facebook followers to give me their email address?’
That’s simple, ask for it. A few popular ways to get people to sign up for an email list are: contests, ebook giveaways and coupon codes. I don’t know about you, but I’ve signed up for many email lists in order to get a discount on my order or enter a contest.
It’s very important that your audience provide you with their email address willingly for them to actually want emails from you. Buying email address lists isn’t going to get you an engaged audience.
Once you’ve grown your own email list, the fear of your Facebook closing its virtual doors on you will be a thing of the past.
Ready to get started? Check out this blog post:
Reviews are a secret weapon for local businesses.
Business greeting cards are a very cost-effective marketing tool that small businesses can use to strengthen customer relationships. Business greeting cards come in various formats, from e-cards to SMS cards, you can send them to customers and prospects on occasions like birthdays and anniversaries, congratulate them after a major achievement, or simply to thank them for their business. Here's a blog post from one of my partners about business greeting cards that I found to be a great read so I wanted to share it with you. Enjoy!
This is a popular question that we get a lot. What type of website should I use for my business? Should I build a website myself? Can’t I just let my sisters’ boyfriends nephew build it? He seems like he’s good at computers? My friend is telling me to make a WordPress / Wix / Squarespace website because it’s so easy to build yourself. These are just some things we hear regularly. Let’s dig into these. “My friend is telling me to make a WordPress / Wix / Squarespace website because it’s so easy to build yourself.” I had an initial consultation with a new client last week. She reached out to us about building an e-commerce website for her business. During our meeting, it came up that for the last year she had been trying to work on building the website herself via Shopify, but could never get it to look how she wanted it to look. She said that she had spent hours searching for instructional videos on YouTube on how to do this thing or that, only to find that more often than not, she found something else had broken because of following the steps she was told to take. She told me how frustrating the entire process has been and how she can’t even guess how many hours and hours that she’s wasted trying to figure it out. Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and these other are easy once you’ve put in the time to become familiar with them and how they work. After only a short time of using them, you should have no problem figuring out how to add a photo, text box, links, etc to your budding new website. That being said, while these tools are easy to start, they can be much more difficult to master. Learning the more onerous tasks can be quite frustrating when attempting to learn via trial and error. Can you figure it out? Of course you can. Anything is possible if you devote the required time and attention to it. Also, how long is this whole learning and development process going to take? 40 hours? 80 hours? How many hours a week are you prepared to dedicate to researching and learning how to build your website? Ok, it’s done! All of your hard work paid off and your business’s new website is live for the public to access. Does it represent your business in the professional way that it needs to be presented? Does it work well on smart phones? Do visitors feel encouraged to take the next step in your buyer’s funnel, or are they backing out of your site and heading to your competitors? For most business owners, the tiny amount they save by building their new site themselves pales when compared to the time savings, ease of development, professional final product and increased customer conversions that they get when they choose to work with a professional website developer like us. So which website is best for a business? The one that pays for itself time and time again because it looks great, works great and helps guide your visitors into becoming paying customers. Schedule a call with us today to discuss how we can help your business with a new website, social media management, SEO and other marketing services.
