This morning I received an email from a reader linking to an article from Ducati, the famous motorcycle company, about why they decided to remove their Corporate Blog and replace it with a Facebook Page. In the article they highlight the various reasons that they decided to make the shift. While they may have justified the shift and think it was a smart idea, in reality they just shot themselves in the foot … here’s why.
Corporate blogs are good for a number of reasons, most importantly search engine optimization. While a company may not have resources for company blogs, any large corporation can easily put aside the budget for one … it really isn’t that expensive. The primary reason to keep the blog is that gaining fans on your Facebook Page is a conversion game. While fans will come through Facebook, and you can pay for Facebook ads, the user acquisition cost via a blog should be comparable to the cost of acquiring fans directly from Facebook.
Any effective social media marketing strategy involves multiple channels. Yes, Facebook should be one of your company’s primary marketing channels, however killing all other channels and replacing them exclusively with Facebook is not only a bad marketing gimmick but it’s also a great way to kill off your other channels of new Facebook fan acquisition. By embedding your Facebook fan box on your website (as we have done on this website’s sidebar), you can dramatically increase your Facebook fan base.
Combined with search engine optimization, your blog could become the largest source of new Facebook fans. So word to the wise, if you are considering killing your company blog, think twice about it because you may just be killing one of your greatest potential channels for acquiring new Facebook fans.
Thanks to Vincenzo Cosenza for the tip.
“however killing all other channels and replacing them exclusively with Facebook is not only a bad marketing gimmick but it’s also a great way to kill off your other channels of new Facebook fan acquisition” – so true. Nice Post Nick!
Lets not leave out just how unreliable the facebook platform is. constant changes in the api, apps, privacy settings and the fact that they can pull the plug on the web property they own and a business relies on at will.
A good social media need be multifaceted and ultimately result in pringing communities and customers closer to the properties that are controlled by the business (both virtual and brick and mortar)
This decision seems short sighted and self destructive.
I love facebook for social interactivity and local and niche news, but if I want to learn about a company, I’m not going to facebook, I’m going to google. stupid, stupid, stupid
The biggest advantage to corporate blogs that I’ve found is being able to communicate messaging and intelligence fully and thoroughly: Facebook just isn’t the right venue for that.
I mainly agree … but only if your corporate blog performs well (and really optimize search results) and has already established a community of readers. If not, it’s more likely that a well managed Facebook Fanpage will acquire new readers for your blog.
However, killing the blog isn’t really a good idea.
Great comparison Nick.
This is the perfect example of a social media strategy gone bad because of the lack of common sense. Imagine if you were the VP of advertising of a Fortune 500 company and suddenly you decide to focus all your advertising on, let’s say radio, because now you have a lot of listeners turning to radio. You decide to kill your TV campaign, OOH and alternative media.
it is the same in social media, you cannot focus on one single channel, to be able to reach a broader audience, your strategy must be multi channel (blog, Facebook, Twitter & other relevant social networks to your targets).
Thanks for your post Nick.
Moving solely to FB also says “cheap!”. We’re too cheap to build and maintain a corporate website, blog etc. Not good. What happend when FB changes their privacy, sharing or other policies that you must now obey to the letter? And branding? Now you’re just a subsidiary of Facebook!
I would say the biggest reason to NOT do this is because you control your blog and the platform where it is hosted. On Facebook you have limited control of the platform that businesses are investing so much time and money into.
A crazy decision in my opinion.
Great article. My comment is this: not everyone is on Facebook! There are a lot of people out there who are on the Internet, but reticent about joining a social media service for fear of their “personal information” going viral. How do you reach those people in your marketing scheme?
I totally agree that this is a bad move. i think sometimes too many companies try to be a trailblazer. Facebook is on a high right now and I don’t think it will go anywhere but everything has a saturation point before it falls back down. MySpace did and so will Facebook.
I totally agree with John McTigue about this looks cheap. This is the same effect as going to a website and scrolling to the bottom and reading Powered by This Free Web Service or Intuit or whatever your poison maybe.
Nick– good point on killing the SEO for all those pages. But the good news is that Facebook page should now rank highly. A Facebook fan page should be more than just a blog, too.
Nice thoughts. Nevertheless the implications of such a step – shifting from a corporate blog to Facebook page only – should be clear to anyone responsible in this company, as mentioned before negative impact on SEO, relying 100 % on an external network with privacy issues and the fact that you might not reach out to all of your former blog readers on Facebook.
It’s like to say: I’m not any more going to supermarket, because I have my own fridge. Or even opposite: I don’t need fridge at home, because I have supermarket on the plaza 3 minutes away from my home.
I think that decision shows a lack of understanding of the various value propositions on each medium. Twitter is not Facebook is not Foursquare and replacing one for the other is not a solution. In a well-orchestrated social strategy, each channel should serve a distinct purpose and deliver content in the way that is most meaningful to that platform’s audience.
It surprises me to see that such a well known brand such as Ducati would make such a terrible marketing move.
May I ask what were the “brilliant reasons” they had?
I’m surprised at the number of Facebook page creators and admins that aren’t aware that search engines can’t index their wall updates.