5 Reasons Why You Should Not Use Face book for your Business

Reason number 1

By conducting most of your business on Face book you weakening the power of your website.

I am amazed when large corporations such as MSNBC, CNN, Entertainment Tonight, and local TV outlets have their anchors say; Hey check us out on our Face book page or join us on Twitter.

Little do they know they are slowly weeping away the value or ranking of their main website on search engines.

Are you doing the same?

While you spend all your time communicating on Face book instead of your website you are actively passing along valuable time and traffic to Face book. Face book will grow and grow while your website shrinks and shrinks.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and other major search engines assign a higher value or position to a website that gets more visits and traffics over similar competing websites. Any savvy website owner understands that human visits and human traffic accounts for their website(s) placing higher in search engine queries.

(Stop reading here if you have conducted hundreds of business transactions over Face book and made a profit from your labors.)

Reason number 2

You do not own Face book and you do not exclusively own your Face book page.
You are simply leasing space for free on Face books' Web application. So do not be surprised if all the hundreds of hours you spent conducting business on Face book suddenly disappears.

See: http://www.visionefx.net/articles/using-social-networking-for-business.htm

While Face book does allow you to download all the content you posted such as text, links and photos; if you were to upload all this information to another website, you will have none of the software application features that are at the core of Face books' application.

Reason number 3

Face book is a 'Social Networking' Application. PERIOD.
Unless you have a 'Social Network' plan in place, then your business does not belong on Face book. Face book is a 'Social Networking Tool'. While there are some interesting ways to extend your presence over the World Wide Web; without putting some strategic plan in place for using Face book is simply a waste of time.

Think about it. Would you get on a plane without a travel plan, hotel reservations, spending budget, travel itinerary, transportation planning and return date? If you do not have any plans and goals for your Face book strategy then you are simply wasting your valuable time.

Reason number 4

You have little or no control over defamatory material.
If you have your business on Face book then it stands to reason that you will probably leave your page open to all for posting and sharing otherwise people are not going to take the time to wait for you to approve for joining your page.

What if some post or information gets on your Face book page that is defamatory or damaging to your business. Will you be able to call someone at Face book or get help?
If you do not exclusively control your web page, website or other web application then you are opening a huge can of worms. (see the screen shot below)

Unless you are ready to spend lots of time monitoring your Face book page on a day to day basis in addition to responding to any and all complaints then don't put your business on Face book.

Reason number 5

Large Web site Can Go Down. I always say; " Never put all your digital eggs in one basket".
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina I got calls from web site owners who had web sites hosted on servers in the New Orleans area who lost their sites. Many of these people did not have a back up of their web site or know their domain credentials.

This can potentially be a huge problem.

See: http://www.visionefx.net/articles/guard-your-domain-name-hosting-and-web-site.htm

Even the most large and powerful web sites can experience technical problems.

In December 2010 a hacker group launched a number of 'service denial' attacks where a number of large web sites were knock-off line. If you are doing business on Face book, don't think that Face book is exempt from hackers or other technical difficulties; made-man, natural disasters or other online interruptions.

Below are screen shots I captured in 2010 showing service interruptions I personally experienced using Google, Twitter, You Tube and Face Book.

About the Author
Rick Vidallon is President of Visionefx, a Web design company based in Virginia Beach, Va. They provide services to national companies as well as small to medium businesses throughout the United States. Rick can be reached at (757) 619-6456 or rick@visionefx.net.