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Recently I gave a presentation to the Silicon Valley chapter of the American Disc Jockey's Association (ADJA) based on my own experiences using social media to market my businesses and causes. The one element of that presentation I'd like to share with other small business owners, advocates and hobbyists is why a blog post is always my preferred medium to publicize anything.
For most of us, blogging has the potential to be a more effective marketing medium than Facebook or Twitter to deliver the messages we want to publicize whether it's a product or service, promoting causes that are important to us or simply having a way to communicate with people who share our hobbies and interests without having to join a forum.
Access to the Information
Facebook is great, but it's marketing to a closed audience. When you blog the entire world is your audience. According to Statcounter there were 155,000 new and returning visitors to The Flirty Blog in 2010. This total doesn't include the people who have subscribed and read each post in their RSS readers. Compare that number to the 597 friends who have the opportunity to see my content on Facebook, and the numbers speak for themselves.
Limitations
My own experience tells me that Facebook offers a limited audience and Twitter is too limited in the amount of information I can post. Which isn't to say you shouldn't have and use both -- I have and use both. I'm just saying don't use them as your primary marketing medium. They play supportive roles to my blog.
Archives
Neither Facebook or Twitter have an archiving or search function that compares to the effectiveness of these features on a blog, giving new visitors/readers the ability to hone in on exactly the topics that interest them as quickly and easily as possible.
Search Engine Indexing:
But one of the most important reasons I prefer posting content on my blog vs. Facebook or Twitter is because search engines index blog content more quickly and effectively, often within minutes. Indexing is important because this is how your blog or website shows as search results for random queries on sites like Google and Yahoo leading new readers to your content. I rarely see Facebook links turn up in organic search results and when "tweets" do they have always been long gone from the Timeline Page when I've clicked over.
Take this query to show you an example of how information is not indexed by Facebook or Twitter. I did a search for two photo albums I created on the same day last fall. One is an album on Facebook set to "Everybody" and the other is a collection of photos on my blog. Both are of my dog's 2010 Halloween costume. So for the purpose of this example say I'm selling Dog Otter Costumes as my business, and I want people to discover these photos because some of them may order an otter costume for their dog next Halloween.
Kitai's Halloween Costumes 2010 Album on FB
Kitai's Halloween Costumes 2010 Web Results
Notice even when I search the exact album title the album doesn't show up in the Google web results. Google has not indexed my Facebook photo album.
But the web results do draw up other sites that talked about Kitai's costume, including my blog, his Cutest Dog Ever website and even The Flirty Guide where I featured an earlier costume as a Flirty Idea in 2009.
Kitai's Halloween Costumes 2010 Image Results
Cutest Dog Ever Sea Otter Halloween Costume Blog Post
Cutest Dog Ever Sea Otter Halloween Costume Web Results
