Blog vs. Facebook – Which Should Be Your Social Media Hub?

  

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A reader made a very astute observation on one of my earlier blog posts about the hub and spoke approach to leveraging social media.  It caused me to pause and take a second look at the diagram that I originally developed and presented for REBarCampTO back in May 2010. Upon reflection it is time for it to get updated.

2010 Hub and Spoke Diagram

2011 Hub and Spoke Diagram

Over the last year (in my humble opinion) the underlying hub and spoke strategy has held true. Social media sites, no matter how powerful they have become still remain as spokes. Your blog (not so much your website) should be your hub. One thing that has changed is the increased importance of your blog and the greater importance facebook business pages are haveing.

Good quality engaging content is the fuel that drives this hub and spoke approach. You want to create and disseminate content that people say ‘thank you’ for. That content should live on your blog. Gary Vaynerchuk coined the phrase the ‘Thank You Economy’ and is releasing a book soon on the notion that you have to give to get.

Some arguments have been made that your business page should be your hub. But I still believe that even though it has incredible capacity to build community and expand your sphere of influence it should still remain as a spoke. You business page should be fuelled by the content that lives on your blog.

There are many reasons that your blog should remain as your hub some of which include:

1.       By consistently creating all this great content you will be generating incredible Google juice. You should get that benefit not facebook.

2.       Facebook maintains the right to either shut your business page down (if they think you have violated their tos) or make it a community page if they deem it appropriate. If that happens you will not only loose all that great content that you aganized over but you will also loose the community that you built up. Whereas if you push them to your blog from the facebook business page they will still know where to go to get all that great content.

3.       Even though 1 in 2 Canadians have a profile not everyone is on facebook so if you only post your content there you are missing a big opportunity to reach those non facebook users or those who are on facebook but have discovered your business page.

I am sure there are many other reasons and would welcome other supporting arguments or if you disagree i would love to hear why. Just post your comments below.