Sometimes these blogs come from questions thrown out into twitter. this particular topic, the result of a tweet by @danielmclaren
It got me thinking. Imagine this scenario:
You’re a website owner. You have a brand and products or services to sell. A bright young business development person gives you a call with an opportunity that goes like this:
Hi. I have a widget. I would like you to put my widget on your home page. The widget will have my branding and will link to a page on my site where your customers can interact with each other. You can add your logo on the page, but the users are mine and all data and content on the page also belong to me.
We will have no agreement between each other and I reserve the right to change the functionality of the page and how it integrates with the widget on your home page at any time. All this is totally free to you, but in return we get to collect information about your customers and advertise to them. You can advertise to them too, but you have to pay us.
We won’t compensate you for the real estate taken up by the widget and won’t pay you for any traffic that you deliver to our site.
Do we have a deal?
What would you say? Would your answer be based on sound commercial principles? Ordinarily, if someone pitched you an ‘opportunity’ like this, you would ask yourself – what’s in it for me?
Perhaps it is too abstract. Instead of thinking about the above example as a spam email from a web-company in China, think about it in the context of Facebook.Perhaps you’ve never thought about it in those terms. Maybe you have, but figure the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Getting people to visit your website is hard work. It takes investment in time and or money. Perhaps you spend money on television, radio or magazines to invite people to your website. Perhaps you invested in SEO to get good natural search results for your desired keywords. You may have bought your traffic via PPC or CPM based internet advertising, or you may be using social media tools like Digg and YouTube and Twitter to lure people onto your pages – the pages where you hope to make your money – the pages where your customers make transactions.
Do you know how much it costs to get each of your web visitors to your page? If you did, you might be less likely to let those people leave your site for free.
While your interactions might happen on Facebook, your transactions happen on your website. Therefore you should think carefully before giving Facebook (and other social networks) free real-estate on your site that could be generating you money.
There are some exceptions – allowing new customers to log-in with Facebook credentials could make it easier for them to transact with your business.
There is also nothing wrong with allowing customers to keep in touch once they have completed their transaction. If customers do ‘like’ you on Facebook then you can establish a relationship with them that lasts after they have left your site and reduce the cost of acquisition for return visits.
Next time you invite someone to follow you on Twitter or like you on Facebook think about what you are gaining and what you are giving up.
Tags: Aquisition cost, customers, Facebook, Marketing, ROI, transactions, widget
