In his “State of the Word” address, Matt Mullenweg said it best [I'm paraphrasing here], “when you don’t own the site, look at who the customer is: It’s not you.” You are not Facebook’s customer. Those who advertise there are.
It can happen. You can loose everything! Sites are bought out, entities merge, priorities shift. And if you’ve “built” your online presence around your Facebook page, and something goes wrong, there goes the farm.
Ashley T. Caldwell of The Modern Connection and I recently taught a workshop whose subject was creating social media strategy and implementing it using promotions. She advises strongly that companies using Facebook for promotions do so adhering to all the Terms and Conditions of Facebook or they risk loosing their pages.
Penny C. Sansevieri writes in her HuffPo blog post:
“Its a great thing, this social networking, but what a lot of people forget is that you dont own the sites you are populating. While Facebook owns the world pretty much right now, things could change. But more than that, sometimes a slight “uh-oh” from you and a slight violation of the sites terms of service can cause you a world of grief. We had a client several years ago who built up 5,000 friends on his personal profile. I kept cautioning him about doing promotion on that page as Facebook has rules against doing promotion on a personal profile. He continued to do promotion though not heavy and lost his page. He never got it back. His entire tribe of 5,000 people were lost in the minute it took Facebook to pull down that page.
Get yourself a website now on a domain you own, on a web site host you control. With your own copyrighted concept.
Read the full article from Penny C. Sansevieri: The Quickest Way to Kill Your Online Success.
