Facebook Could Be Bad for Your Business

Facebook surpassed Google in the USA in terms of user traffic for the week ending March 13.

According to the boffins at analytics firm Hitwise, Facebook picked up 7.07 percent of all U.S. web traffic, whilst Google snagged 7.03 percent.

Looking at the figures another way, Facebook increased 185 percent compared to the same week last year, whereas visits to Google increased only 9 percent.

What this means for your business?

Although Facebook has overtaken Google before, this is the first week that the search engine giant has been beaten into second place for seven days.

The figures don’t surprise me – that much! Since the autumn I’ve been regularly hearing more and more businesses saying: “We really need to be on Facebook”.

I wasn’t sure if this was because Facebook has been talked up so much in marketing and communication circles or because people are genuinely using Facebook as a regular part of their lives.

Whilst I do think there’s a lot of value in having an active Facebook Fan Page, it’s important that we don’t focus solely on putting our energies as businesses into building a presence on one site. Particularly a site that we don’t own and don’t really have much control over.

The history of the Net shows that communities don’t stick around in one place forever. David Meerman’s Scott‘s first edition of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” dedicates quite a few pages to MySpace and Second Life. Remember them?

Although these sites never achieved the same kind of breakthrough as Facebook (Currently at approx. 400 million users ), it’s not entirely ludicrous that social media sites that tap into local communities like Gowalla and Foursquare –which are really beginning to gather momentum– aren’t going to water down Facebook’s traffic.

So, by all means, if you’re a business get excited by what Facebook can help you achieve. It can certainly help you connect with people and show a more personal, informal side of who you are and what your organisation does if you invest in time and resources developing the right kind of marketing and communications strategy.

But don’t see Facebook as the “promised land” of customer-brand interaction just yet. If you drink to much of the social media kool-aid and put all your marketing and communication efforts into Facebook, you could be left feeling rather sickly.

You’d be naive to forget that there are numerous other ways of connecting with and selling to your audience online such as through a business blog, twitter, good old-fashioned forum, etc.

For all the value Facebook brings, it’s still much easier to generate a sale from search engine marketing.