Facebook vs Blog Content

This is the third installment of the Facebook for Business series.

As the number of businesses using multiple social media platforms continues to grow, the question frequently comes up: Which content should go where?

Is it Facebook content or blog content?

The two platforms that provide the biggest source of confusion are blogs and Facebook. There is a purpose for both, and each is ideal for particular types of content. It is important to understand the intention of each of these channels.

So, should you put your next update in your blog or on your Facebook page?

The purpose of a Facebook business page is to:

Connect with old customers, new customers, potential customers, and colleagues;
Share content that is both relevant and interesting;
Engage your fans with contests, business news, and other engaging content;
Keep fans in the loop on upcoming events, conferences, or anything where your company will have a presence.

The purpose of a business blog is to:

Display your expertise;
Develop a depth of content that distinguishes your business;
Bring readers up-to-date with the latest industry information;
Keep momentum going in the search engines for important keywords and topics.

If your content is meant primarily to engage, or is something you want to quickly share with others, post it to your Facebook profile. Examples of Facebook-appropriate material include: announcing a limited- time offer, photos of a local event your business attended, videos, or anything with a more personal tone.

If you can distinguish your company by elaborating on business-related topic, make it a blog post. Blogs are an excellent forum for professional information, and can spark interesting dialogues as people post comments. If your target market is local, take advantage of the opportunity to include relevant localized keywords and information. Like Facebook, blogs can be used for a variety of material, and may incorporate some of the pieces you put on your Facebook page (images, videos, etc.).

It’s not always clear-cut whether a post should go on Facebook or on your blog. In some cases, writing a blog post and linking to it from your Facebook profile (and other web presences) is the best strategy. It is often a case by case situation.

Both platforms are important in establishing your online presence, and it’s important to properly link them together, as well as to your other sites—most importantly, your main website.

9 thoughts on “Facebook vs Blog: Where Should You Post Your Content?”

I was looking for information on what facebook offers that a blog doesn’t offer, and found this article.

It seems to me that your separation between facebook and blogs here is rather arbitrary and a little bit artificial. Could you elaborate on why you can’t use a blog for all of the uses for facebook you mentioned above, or why you can’t use facebook instead of a blog?

spencer taylor says:

August 3, 2010 at 10:06 am

Thank you for commenting.

The short answer to your question is that you can. You can use your blog like a Facebook page and you can use your Facebook page like a blog.

The problem with that is that you are not taking advantage of the inherent functionality and purpose of each medium. What this really gets down to is engagement levels. Let’s look at Facebook first.

Facebook is busy, on every screen there are multiple areas of information about you, your friends, advertisements etc. This kind of venue does not lend itself well to a high level of engagement. If you wrote a blog post of a couple hundred words and put it on your profile or fan page chances are that by the time someone got two sentences in they would get distracted and go look at something else. Facebook is a place for snippets of information to get aggregated and shown to a multiplicity of different people. It is a great place to put teasers for your blog but to use it as wold be trying to fit a square peg on a round hole. The other dimension to look at is the SEO value you get from blogging. If you used Facebook as your blog rather than blogging on your website, you would get no credit for all of that keyword rich Google fodder which would hurt your overall web presence.

On the flip side, using your blog like a Facebook page will hurt engagement as well. If I subscribe to your blog via RSS and I get notifications that you are posting snippets of “Facebook style” information frequently it is going to get old fast. If I follow the link to your new information and the post is three sentences about what happened to day I am going to trip over my pinky finger to hit UNSUBSCRIBE. People expect to see articles in blogs, not updates. Facebook is built for noise, blogs are built for thoughts.

So the summation of all of this is that you can use them however you wish but you might as well use them as they were intended because that is how you will get the most out of each medium. To build a healthy relationship between your Blog and your Facebook page, use Facebook to post teasers for your blog, that way people know what you are doing and can make the choice to engage further and go to your blog where they can focus on your ideas.

Thanks for the insight. I was ready to ditch one or the other because as a Wedding Photographer, demands on my time are relentless.

Since people photography falls into one of those Artist type vocations, I have a personal Facebook page but not a Fan or Business page. Any thoughts on this philosophy would be appreciated.