Facebook

[AbstractErosion]

I have some problems with FB, but It's so much easier to add pics than to my actual website. For that reason, I love it. Plus more people look at it than my site, which is usually zero traffic.

[Ryder]

I recently signed up for a facebook account for my horse sculpture buisness www.ryderhorses.com . It has generated a lot of likes and inquires so far since people with horses seem to have a facebook account and enjoy reading and seeing things about horses.

[Mack]

The business account is different than a personal account?

[Ryder]

There are probably lot's of different accounts on facebook but I am just forging ahead with what comes easily. The price is right....free......and folks seem to be checking my stuff out.

[Art-Deco]

Originally Posted by Mack

The business account is different than a personal account?

Yes, for one thing you can't contact other people or post on their wall with a business acct, at least not that I've seen when I tried it briefly, so you are almost all but isolated- not one person ever posted anything to my comments, people I know whose page allowed me to post to it said none of my posts showed up for them, yet I could read them when logged in.
Most people's pages had no way to either contact them OR post to their wall, as a business acct you could only read it and other peoples' comments.
Personally I feel farcebook is a silly waste of time, and they want your name, personal details, email address and a phone number to verify it's really you, of course the real reason they want all that should be obvious when you see the profits they make off this- they make your information available to "advertisers" and other spammers, that's where the money comes from.

Once you create an account you can only close it, once you do that they continue spamming you with "invites" to "come back to facebook" again, but if you ever go back to the main page you will discover it's not really closed and gone, it's only "inactivated", everything you put in there is still there and the moment you log in it's all reactivated once again.

[Art-Deco]

Originally Posted by tonofelephant

G: Cheese is right. You can use Google Analytics (its free - don't know why, most analytic places charge for the same information) to find out where and how many visitors come to your website/blog. Not only does GA tell where the visitor is from (state & city) it also tells which pages are accessed and for how long. A great free tool. Unfortuantely it is addictive to check and will burst your bubbles on how effective your marketing is.

From GA, found out that 15 people visited my sight over 2 years time from the ISC. More local organizations delivered more hits. Guess who got dropped? These were hits not sales.

Carl

This information is already available for free with every web site hosting company I know of, it's included in your "control panel" for your web site in several ways, "Awstats" is the main one, and it breaks down hit referrals, duration, what pages were viewed, what country, browser type , search words used and what sites have links to yours.
"Hits" don't amount to much, every time a page loads that has 25 images on it, that's about 26 "hits" one "hit" for each object the browser loaded, that's why that stat always shows ridiculously large numbers even for personal sites.

[Chris_Johns]

Facebook can be useful, it's particularity good for putting up lots of images of work in progress etc which would clutter up a more portfolio orientated website.

The big downside is that a FB page is never going to be that distinctive and you only have limited control over it's look and layout. This means that in terms of exposure you are always going to out competed by companies with big marketing budgets and it's not really very targeted, so even if you get lots of people looking at your page there's no easy way to target people who actually want to buy art and FB pages tend not to do that well on search engines.

There is also the issue that FB links are big and clunky which is fine for linking online but for hard copy documents they are a but of a mess compared to a simple and easy to remember link to a proper website.

While FB is good for building a casual audience that doesn't necessarily translate into sales and I don't think that having FB as your main point of contact looks all that professional and you need to be quite careful to keep a proper separation between your professional and personal content which isn't always entirely easy.

There is also the fact that you have very little control on FB and you can suddenly find that significant changes have been made overnight.

Personally I think that FB is only ever an adjunct to a proper, well designed individual website

[Art-Deco]

Originally Posted by Chris_Johns

While FB is good for building a casual audience that doesn't necessarily translate into sales and I don't think that having FB as your main point of contact looks all that professional and you need to be quite careful to keep a proper separation between your professional and personal content which isn't always entirely easy.

There is also the fact that you have very little control on FB and you can suddenly find that significant changes have been made overnight.

Personally I think that FB is only ever an adjunct to a proper, well designed individual website

Exactly right, and sales is the whole point of it all, lots of lookie-loos who never buy anything are worse than useless as they waste your bandwidth and time.
Despite a 1/4 page of text on my php email form explaining the site (and that email form) are for my income, and that I don't have time to help non-clients do what they should be doing in GOOGLE themselves- they STILL send me the form with queries about things unrelated to my web site!

Facebook can change in an instant, since it's free they owe you nothing and you have no rights as you would if you were a paying subscriber, they can do what flickr.com did- HORRIBLE front-end changes that tens of thousands of people complained about, one was the new infinite scroll of huge images.
Youtube did similar big changes with similar protests, but since no one PAYS for a youtube or free flickr account they haven't a leg to stand on.

[Ryder]

Face book is kind of like putting up a poster on a free bulletin board at the local grocery store. Cost?....very low but to what end if you are advertising something that people that shop at that store would not be interested in buying.
I occasionally put up adds at the local gas/mini mart because people with large expensive horse trailers stop there. My new facebook account is populated with only my metal horse photos and news of new projects. The people I friend almost all have a horse in their avatar photo. They also seem to own several or more horses and have a property to keep horses......there for they have room for one or more of my outdoor sculptures. It takes a few minutes to send out photos and answer questions about how much my art costs.

[Art-Deco]

Well Ryder I'm glad it works for you, I for one have major issues with their demands for personal information and how they abuse it for a "free" web page so I opted out of ever having a farcebook account and for that matter a twitty-twatty-twit account with it's 2 lines of text too!