On behalf of Mark Zuckerberg, I would like to say he has shown what passion and technology can do together. He has taken an idea starting in college and has taken that to one of the country’s, no one of the world’s largest mega companies. Not to mention one of the world’s most overpriced stocks on any exchange, and that may not be a bad thing. Facebook (FB) has mad a lot of people very rich, all within a very short time period.

Before Mark left college FB was being used by a handful of colleges, and now there are 2.2 billion active users monthly. That is an astonishing amount of people that are sharing and communicating with family and friends across the world.

Facebook Users & Advertisers

Today, people are still using FB and I have to wonder what their advertisers are thinking, how do they want to show up to their prospective clients or future customers on FB?

FB members knew their information was being harvested for advertisers, but they had no idea their conversations and their friend’s conversations are being used to create their profile. To me, that’s pretty scary in a world that’s leaning towards globalization.

And yes, when you use another platform like FB you know if someone likes your travel page or advertisement they will be added to a, yes you guessed it, a travel list. And these could be your clients.

I work in the travel industry and I’m sure there are other industries out their that rely heavily on FB as their go-to place for finding new clients through advertising. There are lots of articles coming out in travel industry publications questioning FB and suggesting to look at other social networks including Instagram, (and I’m not sure they know Instagram is owned by FB).

Controlling Your Reputation & Information on Your Website

I think it makes much more sense to put more emphasis on developing one’s own website rather than relying on a Social Network or someone else’s website or media that can be compromised by reputation or in our current environment, hack attacks that could ruin reputations and relationships or at least set it back a couple of years.

By creating a friendly, safe platform, (your website) you control the conversation and the relationship is only between you and your customers and viewers. You don’t have to worry about your friends being advertised to on your website except by you.

Advantages Of Small Company Websites

As a medium or small company you have the ability to move faster than the larger travel suppliers like cruise lines, hosting or resorts that can look they have a monopoly on their niche, but in real life, the larger the company the slower they move to keep up with the changing environment.

As an example when the in the early 2000s the large cruise companies did not offer promotion prices on their websites only on PDFs they emailed out to their travel agent email list and now everyone has that access. And some years back they were lagging behind changing over to a responsive website that was easily readable in handheld devices. Both of these could be easily taken advantage of by smaller and more nimble websites.

Small and midsize companies have a distinct advantage ~
to take action and make changes faster than their larger rivals.

OK, on reflection I did start to ramble a bit. But in defense of Mark Z he has shared some light on how our FB profile is being used for marketing. And I believe this is a wake-up call for all of us to take advantage of this time to look at ways to strengthen the relationship we have with our clients on our own website.