Every business today seems to think they need a Facebook page, not to mention Twitter and other social media.
You’ll see “Like us on Facebook’ and ‘Follow us on Twitter’ prominently displayed on more and more websites.
But has anyone actually stopped to ask why your website visitor should bother to “like” you on Facebook? And from your viewpoint, what benefit is it to the bottom line of your business if you get 100 “likes” on Facebook?
I’m going against conventional wisdom here, but I haven’t bothered much with Facebook or Twitter. I’m giving far more attention to Email Marketing.
I’ll repeat that again – in my opinion, email marketing, done thoughtfully and consistently, will be far more valuable for your bottom line than Facebook or any other social media.
For example, I sell an information product online and yesterday I sent an email to my subscriber list. It generated 10 sales – from one email that took me 15 minutes to write. The email was just plain text. No fancy template or anything. Just a plain text email.
Email beats Facebook hands down for marketing
Think about it. Facebook and other social media is where people go to socialise. They don’t go there to buy things. (Actually, that’s not 100% true because there are Facebook groups where you can buy and sell, but that’s quite different from a business just putting up a Facebook page.)
By and large, social media is about entertainment and escapism, so if you’re selling products in either of those categories, then Facebook might be a good option. But for most other businesses, it’s a lousy place to sell anything. (If you’re a large corporate with a nationally-known brand, like Telecom, a Facebook page is useful in terms of communicating with the public – but that doesn’t apply to small and medium-size businesses, who don’t have a bottomless budget for marketing.)
On the other hand, email is where people work and get things done. It’s where they make decisions. If you want to sell to someone, you need to be in the space where they make decisions.
Of course, HOW you do your email marketing is vitally important to whether you succeed or not. That’s the subject of another post. But if your marketing budget is tight, my advice is to forget about Facebook and put those scarce resources into figuring out a successful email marketing strategy.
Let your competitors waste their time and money building fancy Facebook pages and getting “likes”. In most cases, you’ll reap far more sales and profits in the long run by investing the same time and money into email.