I can’t stay away from Facebook this week. This is the third post about the social networking site. It started with these two posts:
Those two posts were going to be it for this week, but then Mark Cuban, business owner including owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the NBA, came out and talked about the social network. He’s frustrated and now he’s taking his businesses elsewhere.
From Mark Cuban – Facebook Is Driving Away Brands – Starting With Mine:
“We are moving far more aggressively into Twitter and reducing any and all emphasis on Facebook,” Cuban says, via email. “We won’t abandon Facebook, we will still use it, but our priority is to add followers that our brands can reach on non-Facebook platforms first.”
The trend of people leaving Facebook seems to be growing. As mentioned above, this is the third article in a single week about the site.
Now, it’s easy to pile on Facebook and look at what they’re doing wrong. The company has done quite a few things right in the past and still do today. You don’t get one billion users by doing things wrong. Well, you do things wrong, but you do enough good things that you are appealing to your users.
However, this again gets to the point of where a company should invest its social media dollars. We’re always fans of creating your own website and having it be the base of your online activity here at GBW. There are disadvantages to this strategy. It’s a lot of work to create a custom website and to maintain a custom website. That being said, you get complete control over the user experience.
What seemed to push Cuban over the edge was the fact that Facebook was charging him to reach his own followers. The assumption with businesses on Facebook seems to be that if someone likes your page it’s an opt-in to see all updates from you. That’s not the case. In fact, estimates put the number at 10-20% of your followers actually seeing your updates.
Now, say you create something like a blog on your own website and work to get email subscribers to the updates. You won’t get 100% response, but you will be able to send those people emails as long as they subscribe. Some will open. Some will click. You own the channel.
It’s interesting to me that Dallas doesn’t have its own site. They have an NBA commissioned site. I’m not sure if that’s how the NBA operates or what. After searching a few teams it seems to be that way. I’m not sure why that is. NFL teams all have their own websites and the NFL teams have actually been doing some really great things with text content and video content this year. The team website is becoming a destination for fans. That’s probably the topic for another post.
This is an interesting trend. People and businesses are leaving Facebook. It’s no unprecedented. Social networks have always come and gone.
Will Facebook disappear?
You never know.
How would your business react if that were to happen?