At the start of October, Facebook experienced worldwide downtime and, while it was inconvenient for individuals who couldn’t connect with their friends and family, it had a more serious impact on the owners of up to 60 million business pages.

These businesses were suddenly cut off from their clients, contacts and potential sales.

The issues that caused the outage – thought to be a problem with Facebook’s DNS – has been fixed, but it’s left some business owners questioning whether they need more than a Facebook page when it comes to an online presence for their company.

In this blog we look at the benefits of choosing to have both a Facebook page and a domain-based website for your organisation.

3 reasons why many business owners only use Facebook

1. Lack of time

It can take just 10 minutes to set up a Facebook Business page – you can go live by entering some basic details and adding a couple of cover and profile pictures.

The hard work starts after your site is live, though. Facebook itself suggests that companies should post on their pages at least once a week.

Then there are advertising mechanisms to get your head around and messages to respond to.

2. Lack of budget

The beauty of Facebook Business is that it’s free to launch a page and to get the first eyes on it.

Of course, if you want to grow your audience, you’ll need to invest in advertising at some point down the line, although Facebook makes it easy to budget by letting you set spending limits.

3. Lack of technical knowledge

Populating a Facebook Business page is very simple. It’s just a case of filling in a few facts and descriptions and adding your profile and cover photo.

The set-up process designed by Facebook makes all this easy to do.

3 reasons why Facebook is not always enough

1. Facebook is the middle man

When you run a Facebook Business page, you rely on Facebook and its algorithms to connect you to customers.

Facebook has a lot of control over who actually gets to see your site – both organically and through advertising.

2. Downtime does happen

As evidenced by October’s outage, downtime does happen on Facebook and when it does everything from your content to your contact data is lost.

3. There are trolls on Facebook

Trolling can rear its ugly head in many ways on Facebook Business pages.

It can come in the form of everything from an unhappy customer leaving a negative comment on one of your otherwise harmless posts to something more sinister – a negative campaign from a competitor, for example.

Of course, Facebook tries to make it easy for businesses to ban trolls from their sites.

However, tackling trolling is largely a reactive rather than proactive process on Facebook Business pages.

5 reasons to add a domain-based website to your online offering

1. It can help your business look professional

Having a domain-linked website can add credibility to your business.

If potential customers can’t find your website they may question whether you’re too new or too small or even too illegitimate for them to consider buying from.

A domain-linked website takes time thought and effort to set-up and this reflects on the rest of your organisation.

2. It gives you a direct connection to customers

As mentioned above, Facebook’s algorithms and advertising metrics play a large role in who sees your Facebook Business page.

When you have your own website you are more in control.

When customers visit a domain-based website they have the option of sharing their email address, too.

Given the right permissions companies can then use this email address for email marketing – adding another arm to their outreach efforts.

3. It’s more on-brand

Yes, you can tailor your cover and profile photos on Facebook Business pages, and create posts that reflect your brand voice and colour palette, but your page will still look like a Facebook page at the end of the day.

With a domain-based website you can brand everything – from background colours to calls to action.

4. Not everyone is on Facebook

With 51.15 million active users in the UK, Facebook is the world’s largest social network.

Even so, there are still people who are not on the social media platform.

For example, the largest demographic of people on Facebook are aged between 25 and 34 and slightly more men use it than women.

A domain-based website is a vital vessel for reaching potential clients who aren’t on the social media site.

5. There are international limits to Facebook

There are some countries in the world, like China, where Facebook is either banned or unpopular.

If your business operates in these areas it goes without saying that you’ll need a domain-based website.

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