Does This Mean Associated Press ‘Gets It’ More Than You?
After checking out this story on my favorite tech blog, TechCrunch, I was convinced AP didn’t ‘get’ social media and was desperately attempting to appear relevant with the kids. Sad, really.
Why else would anyone with a blog or website let someone else host their content and then drive all their traffic to that site?
__
But then I started to think about it. Maybe AP is on to something.
Aren’t other big brands rolling out Facebook vanity URLs and securing thousands of ‘fans’?
Isn’t it possible, someone did the numbers and found that thousands of hits on Facebook is more valuable than the same amount of hits on AP’s own site? Or thousands of fans better than thousands of subscribers?
Truth is, it’s much easier to get someone to ‘fan’ your page than ‘subscribe’ to your blog or site. And with 400,000 mill users, many of whom live in Facebook, those fans are very likely to be exposed to your content, ambient-ly, in the stream.
There’s no guarantee a subscriber will ever visit your site, again.
And unless you’re selling ads, the primary objective is not to raise your hit count, but to expose as many people to your brand and message, as possible.
So, maybe this is sound strategy.
Live in Facebook.
