is facebook good for making money?
I don't ordinarily talk about business, but I think this is an interesting subject.
Is Facebook good for making money? Nope.
The best part about using a Facebook fan page is social interaction and discussion. In my experience the discussion threads there are top drawer. The problem is that even as good as social is on FB, it's a dead duck if you want to actually sell anything. It doesn't matter whether it's tangible physical products (as in things you can touch) or intangible virtual products (like eBooks).
Big crowds do not translate to sales on FB no matter how high your fan count is. FB is also not good as a product launch point. Your FB crowd won't be interested and will probably un-like you, or keep the like but purposely filter everything you post off their wall. On top of that, FB has some fairly strict rules when it comes to promoting things you'd want to sell. If you buy ads from them to promote stuff, then sure, they don't have a problem with that because they made money off you. But if you post status updates promoting stuff, that can get you into hot water and you can lose your page.
By and large, the three best resources for product promotion are still email, blogs and YouTube.
Some say email is obsolete. Yeah, well tell that to any internet business guy who has a successful email newsletter. He'll tell you different. Newsletters still to this day command a very "sticky" audience. They work.
Blogs work simply for the reason they're not social networks, and people appreciate having a destination to go to that reflects the personality of the person or business authoring it. I know people to this day that never read my Twitter or Facebook and always come here to read up on what I'm doing. And as far as the must-have-a-dot-com thing is concerned, that's nonsense. What matters more is what happens when people search for you on Google. If by your name or business name your site shows up, they'll find you. Doesn't matter if you have a dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, dot-egg, dot-muffin, dot-whatever. You'll be found.
In fact, Google monitors my blog often enough to the point where on a search, the search result will state when I last updated, like this:
Incidentally, blogs which are inundated with scripting crap cause Google not to show the last-posted-time. As long as your design is simple, Goog will work with your blog easily.
Then there's the YouTube thing that I just wrote about in my last bloggo.
People do search YouTube for products and people all the time. There are even some who will go to YouTube first instead of Google itself.
It is true you really have to hammer at YouTube to make it work for you. All this means is to post videos often.
A mistake I see a lot of people make when it comes to YouTube is they put way, way too much effort into form and not function. All you have to do is plop your ass in front of your computer, make sure what's behind you doesn't look like a dump, record, save, publish, done. That's it. You don't need "a set" because this is not broadcast television. This is internet video, and at the end of the day, nobody cares whether you published in 240p 4:3 or 1080p 16:9 HD. Or said another way, a turd in 1080p is still a turd.
Anyway, I post one video a week on average, and I need to ramp that up to 2. That's in the works along with some other stuff I have planned to go along with the videos.
