Jeremy Blanton

Even With 900 Million Members, Facebook Is Still A Rental Space

Custom WordPress Sites, Facebook For Business

Not too long ago Facebook released it’s latest stats saying it now has over 900 million members. While this is a very impressive milestone, there is one thing I hear from people that makes me want to simply bang my head against my desk is a statement similar to the following one:

Websites and SEO are dead! They are now being replaced by Facebook.

Say what? Last time I checked, my site here is still alive and thriving and the number one marketing tool for generating income. I’ve got a fantastic Facebook page with a wonderful Facebook app that was built by my friend Mike Mueller. I update these regularly and they do help my business. But, I do not focus my energy on driving traffic to this Facebook page. Instead I try using Facebook and any other social networks that I am on to drive those readers to my WordPress site.

Why? Well, it is pretty simple. Facebook, Twitter, and any other social networks that you use are not owned by you. Even if you purchased shares in Facebook, you still don’t own the space you use there and run the risk of being shut down or deleted at any moment if you do something wrong, or get accidentally caught in a glitch of the system. It’s like renting a home. You may want to paint the walls in the house green, but if the landlord says no, you can’t do it.

Better yet, what if Facebook changes something you don’t like. Where do you send your complaint? Does your complaint get addressed in a timely manner? I don’t know about you, but I’ve never once got someone on the phone or by email from Facebook to actually speak to me directly. I was told once that in order to get a personal account representative at Facebook you need to be advertising on their platform and spending around $10,000 per month. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t have quite that type of money available.

The fact of the matter is that they are going to do whatever they want and you don’t have much say. I laugh whenever they make a change to design or features. Almost instantly a new page on Facebook is created complaining about the change that picks up a few million fans hoping that if they band together they can get things changed. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen, but at least misery has company.

Shift Your Home Base

Instead of focusing all your energy on building a large following on Facebook or another social network, you need to direct all that energy and time to building traffic on your website. It’s the only thing out there that you in control of. If you have a custom WordPress site and you want to add a feature to the design, you can. If you don’t want a feature available anymore, you simply log in and delete it. It is your home base that you can claim ownership over and not have to worry about losing at any moment as long as you continue to pay for your domain registration and hosting plan.

This is where most of your time should be spent. Not on sites that could disappear at any moment.

Re-Focus Your Strategy

Here’s where I see a lot of mistakes. We spend our time trying to drive our traffic to like us or follow us on a particular network. It might work well right now, but if you put all your efforts into driving your readers all to a Facebook page that is shut down all of a sudden, they are lost the minute the page dies. Instead, if your readers are in the habit of coming to your website and your page gets shut down, the loss is very minimal.

Maybe you are thinking that I am just being negative by all this talk of pages being shut down, so let’s shift gears a moment. Unless you have a custom app on Facebook, how does someone view your products, make a purchase or even simply contact you about making a purchase? It’s virtually impossible to do so. If a consumer wants to make a purchase, they would at some point need to be pushed to a website to do so.

Your website is where your products or services can be featured. It’s where I can learn more about your business. It’s also the one component of your online marketing that has lasting power. Blog posts I wrote four year ago still bring me business today. Facebook and Twitter status rarely live past 24 hours.

So, before you begin focusing more time and effort into building a large group on a social network, or platform that isn’t your main website, realize that you are using a platform that is here today and could be gone tomorrow.

21 Posts In 21 Days- Lessons Learned From Daily Blogging #21in21

How To Blog, Social Media Advisors

Today is the final day of April 2012 and with that brings to an end a month long challenge. I wrote back on the first of April of this challenge that was given to me by my good friend Mike Mueller and the consequences if either of us did not complete. I am happy to report today that there will be no chicken suit wearing happening any time soon by me.

See, Mike & I had taken the blogging challenge to another level. If one of us did not produce our 21 posts during the 21 business days of April, we would have to dress up in a chicken suit and dance on a busy street corner. Luckily for me, this is my 21st post and fulfills all my requirements for the challenge.

Over the past month though, I have learned a few things regarding blogging:

1. Daily Blogging can be tough when you run a business too. Granted, my business revolves completely around my blog, but some of the days it was really difficult to take the time away from other tasks in my business and focus on writing a post. See, not only do I do social media consulting, but I also do a good amount of traveling as a social media speaker. This month I attended one of the larger conferences I do in a year which took up almost a full week away from the office.

During this time I had to be diligent to sit down and write posts at certain times or have the forethought to write a post the day before and schedule it to publish while I was away from the computer.

2. Creative is hard depending on your business. While I spend a good amount of time speaking in consulting, there is a third aspect to my business where I build custom WordPress sites for clients. I found it can be very difficult to think creatively for blogging content when I was spending several hours doing very technical tasks on a site like writing CSS code. I’d have to take a good break, walk away from the computer and come back later.

3. Book end hours work best for me. I found that I was able to get my best blog posts by either writing them first thing in the morning to start my day, or doing them at the end of the previous day. Whenever I would try to do it in the middle of normal business hours it would take much longer due to many distractions of phones ringing & crisis messages being received from clients that needed immediate attention. The early morning and late hours of the night seem to be much calmer around my house and provide a better atmosphere for writing.

4. Killing social networks proved productive. I used to leave both Google+, Facebook, & Twitter all open while writing so I could multi-task. But what I learned is that it would take me much longer to write then. I also would repeat things or say it in manners that didn’t always make sense. When I shut off all the distractions, I could create much better content in a fraction of the time.

So, now that the challenge is over, what does that mean? Well, nothing really. You will continue to receive content from me on a somewhat regular basis. However I won’t drive myself crazy if a day or two come along where I am busy with other things and do not get the time to write a post. As I share with clients all the time during coaching, don’t write something just to meet a quota or goal. Write because you are passionate about it or feel this post will help both you and others around you be better.

So Mike Mueller, did you finish your #21in21?

Are You Tech-Savvy or a Tech Fool?

Foursquare, Social Media Advisors

Before I get into today’s post, I must first warn everyone that it might be a little bit of a rant to some and different from my normal how-to type of post. Here’s why I am ranting today. I recently received a friend request from someone on one of my favorite social networks to interact with people, FourSquare. So, I clicked on the request notification on my phone which brought me to their profile. When I saw their profile image, I almost blew my gasket.

Instead of finding a smiling face for a person named Andrew, I found their profile photo had been replaced by a QR code. Now, my guess is either Andrew is a really ugly person who broke a camera the last time it tried to take a photo of him, or some marketing genius that he listened to at some point said that QR codes are cutting edge technology that he should implement immediately to make himself look more tech-savvy.

Now, I am not going to get into a debate on QR codes today as that isn’t the point of the post. Instead I would like to focus on way this tool was implemented. In my opinion, I feel Andrew did so many things wrong by using a QR code in this manner.

First, social networks are designed to encourage social interactions and connections with others. When you replace your profile photo with a QR code, or a cartoon avatar, a branding logo, or something else impersonal, you immediately change the mindset people have of you when they are deciding whether to connect with you or not. I know for me, when I see those, my mind immediately jumps to wondering if this person is going to try to push a product down my throat and beg me to buy something from them.

Secondly, Foursquare is a platform designed and built to be used almost exclusively from a mobile device. They have had over 2 billion check ins from mobile devices. In contrast, according to compete.com, their website only receives about 2 million visits. That means that less than 10% of all their members actually visit the full website version. The point behind a QR code is to give someone an easy way to access your content from their mobile phone from some sort of printed material by simply scanning an image.

Lastly, in order to scan a QR code, you need to have a phone with a scanning app. So, for me to scan Andrew’s QR code, I would need a second phone since probably 95% of the people who would see it are on a mobile device already. You can’t use the camera function of a phone to scan something on it’s own screen. So a second device would be necessary to access the QR code. Personally, I don’t know too many people who would go through the effort of borrowing a second phone from someone else just to scan your code.

To me this just makes someone like Andrew look like a fool instead of someone tech savvy. So, before you listen to the next guru or expert who mentions the next latest & greatest technology tool, take a moment to think through how you are implementing that tool. Ask yourself if this will make me more tech-savvy or look like a tech fool.