Inbound Marketing University

I am grateful for very much the time you take to answer and thank everybody who tries to answer the question you posted. They implement what we have been proverb to them. I am grateful for you taking the time to answer this. Thanks for your comments.

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 Well i think that these two things are significant and related to each other. To increase the web traffics which also mean as "advantage", a website do need social media to promote the content as well as to promote the website itself. Some search engines also trust on these kind of social media which uses the crawler known as robot.txt to dig the contents on webpages. Like a seo contest that i joined couple days ago, you may refer to the keyword "IndeHost Web Hosting Bagus dan Murah Indonesia" on ->> http://spektrumdunia.blogspot.com/2012/02/indehost-web-hosting-bagus-dan-murah.html that using google.co.id "Promo Member Alfamart Minimarket Lokal Terbaik Indonesia" and ->> http://www.triharyadi.web.id/2012/02/promo-member-alfamart-minimarket-lokal.html using google.com. These two high competion keyword also different in optimalization because of the ".co.id" and ".com" things. And of course, facebook also become part of my SEO technique on these keywords.

While Facebook is a great platform and you can customize many elements it should be a supplement to your web presence. Keep in mind that FB sometimes goes down/crashes and not everyone uses that. Some folks prefer Twitter, Digg, or My Space.

My suggestion have your client create a blog with a custom domain name. This blog can have the feeds connected to facebook and the development money for a website will be significantly less. Also a blog builds a community which is what a restaurant would want- loyal followers. Create buzz and offer special coupons and such. But don't rely on FB to be the only web presence out there or else many lost opportunities to market will go to the restaurants using other more developped solutions.

Most "brick and mortar" locations just want to get people through the door so online marketing seems strange to them, convince them that web 2.0 is here to stay- dont forget start a blog ;)

 My first thought was that they should have a website but then I started to think that may be I am biased because I think about SEO and conversions and so on and everything is linked with a site. For sure some of the arguments that Rick listed make a lot of sense like the risks involved when you use a third party platform (you can get kicked out when the third party is changing their commercial policy) but for a restaurant it may be that their "landing page" is a special offer for dinner and they just have to count the number of customers they get on that day for that offer. It is also very true that the marketing person in me wants to know more about those customers (who they are, what are their needs and so on) and I would like to profile the customers using online tools so next time I am going to tweet about a new offer or an event in that restaurant I will know to whom to send it and how to write it.

I am still thinking that they need a site but some things may work also without one.

Best regards,

Adrian

They should absolutely have a website. To convince them of this, there are four related issues that you should raise with them:

(1) How Are They Collecting Leads or Sales? -- To do this they need some sort of conversion/landing page. They can't do this on Twitter (they need to send their visitors to their site from Twitter). And it's hard to do in Facebook.

(2) Control -- How much control do they have over their profiles in Twitter and Facebook? Not much. They can work within the existing platform but that includes a lot of constraints that make it hard to turn either platform into the robust independent marketing machine that your own website would be. An example is calls to action & landing pages: In order to create the best calls to action and landing pages you need to test and iterate on a lot of different versions. This is hard to do in Facebook, and you won't have the complete flexibility to create any type of landing page or call to action.

(3) Search -- How much search traffic are they getting? Maybe some via Facebook and Twitter, but probably not as much as they would get if they built their own blog on their own site and started creating lots of content. With your own site, there's more opportunity to rank in search engines.

(4) Bad Business Decision -- Facebook & Twitter are third parties that don't care about individual small businesses. They could change their terms in a way that negatively impacts your business any day. If you have your own website, that type of change wouldn't hurt you too much. If you don't have a website, your online marketing will essentially come to an end.

Overall, I think that in order to get the most out of online marketing you need to use multiple channels. You can't focus exclusively on one. The real value comes from the interaction between them.

What do other folks think?