“My Website is on Facebook”
The most popular lie entrepreneurs tell themselves
Among my clients are community chambers of commerce and other professional associations. Without exception, they all want directories listing their members. This is perhaps the most important benefit of being part of such a group, well worth paying the dues to join. In addition to being a convenience for the group’s members, a publicly available directory is a valuable reference resource used by consumers to find reliable, respectable firms in their community.
I provide a comprehensive array of services to my clients, so it always falls to me to compile these directories and package them for presentation, whether in print or electronic format. Because it is 2025 and every legitimate enterprise must have an online presence, my questionnaires always include a field for the member’s website. On average, about a third of respondents enter a very long URL (uniform resource locator) that begins with https://www.facebook … followed by a string of characters that contains the name of the firm.
When my eye is caught by one of these lengthy web addresses, I shake my head and think, “Oh, bless your heart!” This is not the sarcastic, Southern idiom of reproach, but the traditional expression of genuine pity. Another poor soul is under the delusion that they have satisfied the modern requirement to have an online identity.
I get it. When you’re starting up your own business, you want to save money wherever you can. Because launching a new venture is expensive. Everywhere you turn, there’s another expense you incur or a fee that must be paid. Besides draining your startup capital, uncovering and paying out all these expenses is mentally exhausting. So, of course it makes sense to establish your online presence on Facebook because it costs nothing. Or does it?
What is Facebook and where did it come from?
Well, its origin is nothing if not cringey. No doubt, you’ve heard of Mark Zuckerberg. As the only son of two doctors, he enjoyed a privileged lifestyle and was given the resources to pursue his youthful interests in computing. In 2003, Zuckerberg was ushered into Harvard University from boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy. The socially awkward computer geek had plenty of time to create a website called “Facemash” on Harvard’s network using student photos and personal information he had acquired without permission. Website visitors were asked to rate their fellow students as “hot” or “not.” For distributing unauthorized content and monopolizing Harvard’s network resources, he was reported to the administration. He would have been expelled except for the intercession of his wealthy, influential parents. Instead, Harvard quietly shut down the website and allowed Zuckerberg to remain enrolled.
In 2004, the undeterred Zuckerberg, with the help of his roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, created the Facebook we know, minus the negative features that were incorporated later. Initially, the members-only platform was limited to Harvard students. Membership was later offered to students at universities across the nation. As Facebook’s popularity grew, the group formed a company and recruited Sean Parker, co-founder of the bankrupted music-theft platform Napster to be Facebook’s first president. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard and moved himself and Facebook to Palo Alto, CA. The company’s first investor was PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who would later be befriended by an ambitious Yale law student named James David Hamel, who was actually named James Donald Bowman when he was born. Thiel made his own political pet out of Hamel, who later settled on the name of JD Vance.
In 2006, Facebook membership was expanded to anyone over the age of 13. As the number of users increased dramatically, Facebook’s engineers introduced numerous features, all designed to keep users “engaged” (or addicted, depending on your point of view) for as long as possible. Facebook’s collection of private, personal information about every user made the platform attractive to advertisers who could use the information to target their ads to likely buyers, starting in 2006. Suddenly, every user’s “newsfeed” was filled with advertisements, some purported to be “liked” by users’ friends.
Given Zuckerberg’s background, it’s not surprising that he operated on the presumption that the rules are for lesser beings. All the Facebook scandals, ethics issues, election interference and lawsuits would fill a separate article, so I’ll leave it at that. In fact, Facebook became such a “hot potato,” Zuckerberg launched a new parent company, Meta, of which Facebook was became a subsidiary. The name change to the vague Meta brand also opened up opportunities for “Zuck” to expand his portfolio with new tech businesses, including the virtual-reality “Metaverse” which never caught on.
As of this writing, Facebook claims about 3 billion users. When the platform was first opened to the general public, almost all users were aged 14 to 20 with girls in the majority. But as other social platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram, launched younger users moved on, leaving their Facebook accounts active but infrequently used. As the youth segment left, they were replaced by middle-aged women (probably their moms trying to keep up with them). Facebook claims to delete more than 1 billion fake accounts every quarter, but judging by the number of fake accounts clamoring for my “friendship,” Facebook’s detectives are hopelessly behind.
So yes, you can set up a new business page on Facebook, and you will be charged nothing to create the page. All you’ll have invested is your time. Depending on your level of expertise, the time involved could be minutes or hours … or days. That’s time you could have spent doing your actual business, not promoting it online. But that’s okay because you don’t need that much sleep, right?
Keep in mind that there are more than 65 million businesses – including your competitors – on Facebook, and all their pages look pretty-much the same as yours. Facebook is what it is, and you have no control of how it looks.
Once you’ve set up your Facebook page, is it still free?
Yes … and no. We need to talk about SEO (search engine optimization) for a minute. Search engines like Google deploy “web crawlers” across the internet 24/7. These are virtual “explorers” that wander all over the worldwide web looking for new and interesting web pages. They are trained to pay special attention to webpages that attract a lot of visitors and report the pages to the search engines they work for. The more visitors, the higher a page will rise in rankings, meaning it will appear nearer the top of a search results page. SEO is a digital protocol that virtually drags your webpage in front of a crawler and says, “Hey! Look at this page! It’s cool and people love it!” whether or not the page has actually drawn that much traffic. The web crawler doesn’t know any better and it reports the page to the search engine as cool and worth visiting. Gaming any system is the American Way, right?
Facebook doesn’t do SEO. When you set up your Facebook page, it sits there among billions of other Facebook pages, hoping to be noticed by a web crawler. The only way your Facebook page will ever be noticed by a web crawler is to attract a lot of visitors to it. And the only way to get visitors to your Facebook page is start making posts. Once you make your first post on Facebook, how many people will see it? That depends on how many friends and family you have, and whether they “like” your post, and how many friends and family they have, and so on. During startup, that’s not very many people. Which means your Facebook page won’t be noticed by web crawlers.
You see, Facebook operates using these weird little chaps called algorithms. They’re like a basic form of artificial intelligence. It’s their job to decide who gets to see your post and who doesn’t. Zuck’s minions have trained these algorithms to open the gates only for those who “boost” their posts. Boost is a euphemism for paying a ransom that persuades the algorithms to share your post beyond your friends, family and the handful of people that “follow” your page.
Boosting, in and of itself, isn’t very expensive. You decide how much you want to spend over a period of time chosen by you. You can even set parameters describing what type of person you want to see your post based on their personal information and browsing habits. When you publish your ad, the algorithms distribute it to the users you specified, based on a trove of personal information and browsing history Facebook has collected about users by stalking them. Or at least that’s what they promise. You’ll just have to take Facebook’s word that your ad was actually shown to the users you specified because you don’t get to know who saw it. That would be a violation of privacy, don’tcha know! In exchange for this service, Facebook bills your payment method a pittance every day for the time period you selected.
Sounds manageable … until you realize you have to boost every post you make. Those small charges add up and it doesn’t take long to see what made Zuckerberg into a multi-billionaire. To make matters worse, when you start getting billed for different small amounts over different time periods, keeping track of the charges suddenly becomes a nightmare, unless you have an accountant to keep up with it. Which seems unlikely for a small business trying to control expenses by relying on a free Facebook page.
But wait! There’s more bad news. Every expert on social media agrees, for your business to keep your followers engaged, you must make at least one post every day. And when your followers comment on that post, you must reply to them because they expect a response. Further, you must frequently monitor your Facebook page all day every day and catch negative comments, either responding to them or deleting them. If maintaining a Facebook page is beginning to sound like a full-time job … you’re right. That’s exactly what it is. At some point, you will have to look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Am I going to run a Facebook page or run my business?”
If Facebook is so bad, why is it so successful?
I believe a lot of that success comes from peer pressure. Business leaders have assumed that “everyone else is on Facebook, so we have to be on Facebook, too.” My response: If you lead a large corporation with a broad customer base, and you have a payroll budget large enough to pay full-time social media staff, then yes, you should be on Facebook, as it’s a great tool to engage with your customers at a personal level and cultivate their loyalty.
But if you’re the owner of a small business, Facebook is a big fat time suck that will take you away from running your business, or being with your loved ones, or both. You should disabuse yourself of the notion that Facebook is a valid substitute for your own legitimate website. It is not. Period. See below.
“Well, then,” you say, “I guess I’ll have to build a website.”
If you have the time, the software and expertise to do that, I say, “More power to you! Have at it!” But if your plan is build your site using an online platform like Wix or Squarespace, you should know that building a website using online platforms like them are not nearly as easy or speedy or inexpensive as they make it look. I strongly recommend that you read my article about that.
Bottom line
If you want the online presence of your business to reflect your values and project a professional image, you must accept the cost of a custom-built website as a part of your startup budget. It’s as essential as buying inventory, acquiring furnishings and equipment, or leasing the ideal physical location for your business. I would add that if you want your website to provide the best experience for your site visitors, you are much better off to have it built by a professional. And thanks to the magic of the internet, email and other teletechnologies, I can collaborate with you to build an outstanding website, no matter where you are located. Just get in touch.