Should I start a blog or a Facebook page for my online store?

Social media can be a major time sucker, especially if you are not planned and organised, so it is good to evaluate before you start which is the best way to go. As with any marketing, you achieve the best results if you have a purpose/objective and a plan to get there.

Depending on what your online store is selling, I would suggest that you check out this blog post which helps you identify how many people on Facebook would be interested in what your store is going to be selling. This will tell you how many people have identified in their personal Facebook profiles that item/topic. For example, if you are selling handbags I have just found out that there are 3,900 people in Australia who have listed “handbags” as an interest in their Facebook profile. You then know if a) people on Facebook will be interested in what you are selling and b) if it is worthwhile starting a page.

If you start a blog for the best results you need to post on it at least three times a week for it to get any traction, and ideally more often. You can set up a free blog at www.Wordpress.com if you want to start with minimal investment.

Time is the other big thing to consider. You can get Facebook happening very quickly in terms of building brand awareness with Facebook ads, but a blog takes MUCH longer, like three to six months, and there isn’t really an easy, quick way to promote it. Having said that, you could use Google Adwords, however depending on what you are selling this could be far more expensive than Facebook ads.

If you are selling products I would suggest that you start with Facebook (if it’s suitable after doing the research) and the blog you can either start later, or make it a photo or video blog, which might be easier for you to maintain (depending on the products you are selling). The third option is to outsource your blog writing, you can go to a site such as https://www.odesk.com and find writers on there who will do all the research and writing for you for very little cost.

My final reason for saying start on Facebook is that if you set up your page properly you can get visitors to “like” it, and therefore create a captive audience of people to market to, whereas with a blog if they don’t sign up to your RSS feed when they visit they just become a statistic!

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks www.MyMocks.com, founder of Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media www.Facebook.com/SocialRabbit and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.