Let me preface this by the comment that at first, I thought FaceBook was “a good thing” and fit for its intended purpose. Its unrivalled ability to connect and unite friends and family seemed like a winner! Like lots of other people, I’ve got folks I like who are widely dispersed across the planet. FaceBook provided an unprecedented means of connecting us all, at variable levels. But then it grew – man, how it grew!
To me, it seems the founders have almost completely lost sight of their primary deliverables, obscuring them with sundry half-baked additional features. Ok, so now its got a Chat function… with a pathetic interface and bereft of the usual features found in MSN Messenger, Skype or Yahoo Chat. Its got a primitive messaging system reminiscent of forums and bulletin boards, but devoid of the robust email system features of Gmail or Hotmail, or any of the other purpose built systems that interface with MS Outlook!
Arrogance on the part of its owners over content ownership and concerns about privacy issues notwithstanding, it sucks in many other respects as well.
Business Marketing & Face Book
From a purely business SEO perspective, FaceBook makes no sense to me at all. Lemmings the world over are signed up by the millions because to exist in business, it seems mission-critical to be on FaceBook! Really? Did anyone ever take a step back and ask WHY? C’mon, why on earth would you bother? Can anyone actually produce a reputable FaceBook SEO Case Study that shows how a normal small business has achieved significant ongoing success due to FaceBook? I’d go further – can anyone even show me a set of small business website log files that show significant volumes of traffic from FaceBook as the referring site?
SEO and FaceBook
The leap of faith required to write a positive sentence that includes both “FaceBook” and “SEO” is not dissimilar to that of rubbing a bottle and expecting a Genie to appear… Made a wish, anyone? Having a FaceBook account which links to your main website is about as likely to increase your primary website traffic as a billboard on the moon is. If you are a serious business, frankly there are better uses of your time, money and intellectual expenditure… Yet, people do ask me to SEO their FaceBook pages…
FaceBook & Advertising
Apparently, the primary user base is still kids, students, families, budding entrepreneurs and befuddled geniuses… Those demographics should sound the “zero ROI” marketing alarm for any intelligently run business. FaceBook generally has a one-fifth lower click-through rate (CTR) for advertisements than most major websites across the web. Fewer Facebook’s users click on advertisements than users of many other large websites. Google searchers click on the 1st advertisement in search results approx 8% of the time. Facebook’s users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time! Have YOU ever clicked on a FaceBook Advert? I rest my case!
Company Pages on FaceBook
Apparently, there are senior management who obsess over their company’s FaceBook page… Good grief, these are probably the same guys who kiss frogs in their quest for a princess! Their directors should relieve them of their duties, or at least cancel their annual Christmas bonus payment! Why? In 2010, Sophos’s “Security Threat Report 2010″ polled over 500 firms, 60% of whom responded that they believed that FaceBook was the social network that posed the biggest threat to security. That’s aside from the billions of dollars of lost productivity!
A July 2010 survey performed by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, FaceBook received a score of 64 out of 100, placing it in the bottom 5% of all private sector companies in terms of customer satisfaction, alongside industries such as the USA’s IRS e-file system, airlines, and cable companies. Why did FaceBook score so poorly? Privacy problems, frequent changes to the website’s interface, the results returned by the News Feed, and spam.
FaceBook Missionaries
The fervour of the newly converted to FaceBook frightens me – they become veritable missionaries, intent on converting all to their new faith. Worse, these born-again newbies to the digital world assail the digital superhighway with road trains of garbage. In my opinion, the entire Social Media / Social Bookmarking scenario is a snake-oil salesman’s nirvana, and often vaguely reminiscent of those fire and brimstone biblical prophecies which require of you the faith that “If you believe, you will be rewarded in the hereafter!” As an SEO consultant, I’m rather more focused on the “Here and now!”
The End is Nigh
Last week, after another relentless bombardment of; infantile requests to play mindless online games, chat, participate in ridiculous quests and stupid competitions, cancel Friends Requests from people I don’t know, the need to open FaceBook to answer emails from people who have not yet figured out how real-world email systems work… I de-activated my personal account! Actually, I would have deleted it but apparently FaceBook OWN my account and I’m not allowed to permanently terminate it. How rude is that?
Is There Hope?
Well, yes… possibly, although there are some big “IF’s” involved. IF you are one of the lucky one’s whose website content is good enough to get “liked” by some visitors with a big “Friends” list, and IF they also like you, and friends of their friends also like you… At that point, any adverts you run on FaceBook start to generate a real credibility. I recently saw a motorcycle accessories website advert that was “liked” by 26,000 people! NOW WE”RE TALKING!!!
As a Sunday morning mental excercise, I decided on the spur of the moment to conduct a “real-world test” on FaceBook traffic boosting potential… and created a new post specifically for the purpose; FaceBook – A Real-World SEO Test
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