At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished, nevertheless I do think that it is better than having an e-mail.
There are several reasons for that:
- First (at least for me), an unsolicited e-mail goes directly into trash and I seek the unsubscribe button. Under no circumstances I am interested in additional stuff somebody has to offer beyond the first service.
- People who did not buy your stuff/service can still like you on Facebook, they can do it after they have forgotten some login to your site etc.
- The single best advertising that actually works is recommendation from friends. I think that seeing that somebody else liked something on your feed gets pretty close to that.
- People do like to have all of their "Internet" in one place. Why go to mail if they can have everything in their feed?
- If you use Facebook then they solve a huge number of stuff for you - administration, spam filtering, server hosting, account management (there are other solutions to this of course, but it is good to be able to throw all of this on somebody else)
- I think posting on media sites wastes no more time than creating mailing lists and also requires less tools.
- Advertising for Facebook is mutually beneficial, the more people there are, the more you can reach.
- Also, ads on Facebook have great reach (from what I have heard) and are quite cheap.
- I would hazard a guess that most people are more likely to have notifications on for Facebook rather than e-mail.
Facebook is also probably not going to fail, preparing for this scenario is a nice thought exercise but at some point you have to have some faith in your suppliers. Same goes for Google (mail, docs), Dropbox (file history), Github (issue tracker, code reviews).
There are several reasons for that:
- First (at least for me), an unsolicited e-mail goes directly into trash and I seek the unsubscribe button. Under no circumstances I am interested in additional stuff somebody has to offer beyond the first service.
- People who did not buy your stuff/service can still like you on Facebook, they can do it after they have forgotten some login to your site etc.
- The single best advertising that actually works is recommendation from friends. I think that seeing that somebody else liked something on your feed gets pretty close to that.
- People do like to have all of their "Internet" in one place. Why go to mail if they can have everything in their feed?
- If you use Facebook then they solve a huge number of stuff for you - administration, spam filtering, server hosting, account management (there are other solutions to this of course, but it is good to be able to throw all of this on somebody else)
- I think posting on media sites wastes no more time than creating mailing lists and also requires less tools.
- Advertising for Facebook is mutually beneficial, the more people there are, the more you can reach.
- Also, ads on Facebook have great reach (from what I have heard) and are quite cheap.
- I would hazard a guess that most people are more likely to have notifications on for Facebook rather than e-mail.
Facebook is also probably not going to fail, preparing for this scenario is a nice thought exercise but at some point you have to have some faith in your suppliers. Same goes for Google (mail, docs), Dropbox (file history), Github (issue tracker, code reviews).