Hacker News Reader

Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand why a company would want a Facebook page; consequently all this angst and drama leaves me befuddled. They have a website. They can show people who care pictures of food and whatever else they want. Why would they seek to dilute their web presence and message by helping another company profit from their content?

View on HN

I have asked the same question from a marketing professional. His answers was: We go fishing where the fish is.

The sad truth is, it's hard to get eyeballs on your site. Once that changes the game will change.

Because if people "like" their page on facebook, company updates will show up in those people news feed. People are likely to check their facebook feeds and unlikely to check your company website.

Whether the company wants to build community, let customers know something (plumbing broken we are closed today) or simply show ads, facebook is a way to push it on customers. Website is not.

Most companies do not worry about "diluting" their web presence, they want to be shown as much as possible on as much as possible places.

Because Facebook is visited on a daily basis by people who are your customers, and they provide a free method of delivering advertising to those customers (albeit a significantly smaller subset of their customers these days). I guarantee you that Eat24 has made several orders of magnitude more money from running Facebook campaigns than Facebook has made from ads served alongside Eat24 content.

I mostly agree with you. That said, FB can be used to drive traffic to their site. A little off topic, but: I am just an individual consultant and I write some books. I find FB and G+ to be effective for letting people know when I have a new blog article, open source project, or new book available.

But you are absolutely correct: we should own and develop our own web properties.

Facebook is like any other marketing channel: it can drive a great deal of sales and brand awareness, if you know how to manage the channel well.

Facebook is taxing their channel more in order to capture more of this value for themselves, but there's still value left over for companies to generate and capture for themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com