Okay, so I work with numerous small businesses. A lot of them are owner-operators/solopreneurs and like most people they use Facebook.
There’s a lot of people saying Facebook is awesome for your business…and what I’ve notice a lot of recently is people using Facebook to post content but they’re not linking back to their website.
For instance, there’s a musician I work with and he frequently uploads new videos to his Youtube channel. Then on Facebook, he’ll embed his Youtube video and as you may or may not have noticed – if you’re on Facebook watching a video…it’s very easy to just click and watch it. You don’t have to leave Facebook, you don’t have to do much of anything
That means nobody goes to your website and you’re missing a very crucial opportunity to get traffic from Facebook to your website.
Now, why do you want to do this?
Well, first of all – if you put all your content on Facebook – you don’t own Facebook! Facebook could decide they don’t like your business or they don’t like you and they can kick you off or shut down your fanpage or any number of different things.
So from an asset standpoint, you want to own the asset. You want to have it in an area where you can control it. You want it on your website first of all, and then you can send the traffic from Facebook to your website.
Once it’s on your website, now your visitors are in your territory. You have much better chances of converting them to an email subscriber and once you have their email, you’re much more likely to be able to sell something to them – which is the name of the game.
So the better process, instead of sharing your video on Facebook and they’re only watching it on Facebook…at the very best maybe they’re going to Youtube, what you want to do is upload your video to Youtube as per usual, but then you’d embed that video in a blog post on your website.
You’d write a good blog post, ideally you’d even possibly transcribe the video and put it into the blog post. So then, once that’s all ready to go – you’d go to Facebook and you’d do an update and you’d include the link that sends them directly to the video on your web page.
When you have your Youtube video posted, you’d have a link in the description from the Youtube video pointing to your website. So now you have:
- People who find you on Facebook coming to your website.
- People who find your videon on Youtube coming to your website.
- If you’re on Twitter, you’d obviously Tweet the URL to your website.
You could even create an image related to your video. You could just take a screen capture of the video itself and use that as an image. Put a caption on it and upload it to Pinterest and have a link from that going back to your website as well.
So now you’ve got Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Pinterest all sending traffic to your website. That is much better than having content on Facebook that just points to Youtube or just people watching a video directly on Facebook and never leaving it.
There’s so many distractions on Facebook and people don’t go to Facebook to buy. They go there to get away from things, to get away from work.
This is what I call “landing the plane” because I have an image of what it looks like when you post content on Facebook and you don’t send people to your website.
Get the traffic out of social media. Get them to your website and then you can convert them into subscribers and buyers.
Anyway, that’s it. Get rid of the social media silos. Send more traffic to your website and prosper.
Photo Credit (modified): Doc Searls