It has nothing to do with occasional downtime.
I’ve seen lots of stories, tweets, and hot takes about yesterday’s Facebook outage. They point to the outage as proof that your business should have a website rather than relying on Facebook.
I think this misses the point. Anyone who operates a website has experienced the challenges of running a site. Facebook has better uptime than most webhosts. Anyone who uses WordPress can share an experience of being hacked. And creating a website on Wix or Squarespace is a lot more work than creating a Facebook page. For small businesses, the allure of Facebook pages in place of a website is that it’s easy, free, and requires no technical maintenance.
The real reason you shouldn’t rely on Facebook (or any other social network) for your sole web presence is that Facebook acts as a middleman between your customers and you. Your business is the product when you create a Facebook page. Facebook will only show your posts to a subset of your customers, and it wants you to pay to reach the rest.
Having a website gives you a direct connection to customers. Having a domain name gives your business credibility.
Businesses should consider making Facebook part of their marketing plan. But relying solely on a Facebook presence is a mistake, and it’s not because of downtime.
Completely agree.
Facebook (& other social platforms) help you build an audience, only to later sell it back to you.
Social media platforms are just a supplement.
Either way. the value of dot-Coms with commercial and/or dictionary meaning, are going up again.
>> stories, tweets, and hot takes about yesterday’s Facebook outage
Why don’t you mention some of those stories, tweets, and ‘hot takes’ about the outage? And how many people were talking about how you shouldn’t rely on something like a FB page for your entire business?
I find that a lot of smaller businesses, especially in rural areas of the USA, rely solely on their FB page and ‘friends’ to promote their business. It’s a shame that they don’t see the value in even setting up a Google My Business listing (free) or even buying a domain name ($10/year) and website ($20/mo).
If we show more businesses the VALUE of having their own domain name and website, we all will sell more domains.
Exactly that Andrew. People see Facebook in the same infrastructure light as streets and roads, but its neutrality is not the same. Even toll roads don’t charge more if you carry more valuable goods.
And a lot more control over the page, much better analytics…
Very well said.
I fully agree.