Do you redirect your customers to Facebook too?

When someone asks for your phone number, you don’t answer “Find us in the Golden Pages”, right? And yet, many companies make the mistake of veiling their online identity with a “Find us on Facebook”. Time to take control of your own destiny using a domain name.

A recent study by Mobilosoft led to the following conclusion: companies pay too little attention to how their contact information is mentioned online—on their own website, but also on Foursquare, Google Maps, Facebook... The study examined if addresses, phone numbers, but also opening hours, were mentioned correctly. These latter are often a disaster, especially on Foursquare, a location-based social network where it is mainly users who publish information about companies.

The study reported worrying results: only one in the 1,000 companies that were examined had its contact information mentioned correctly. This conclusion should encourage you to check if the information regarding your site is mentioned correctly on Facebook, Foursquare, but also on local, Belgian sites such as Goldenpages.be, Resto.be and Openingsuren.com.

Be that as it may, the best place for all this information remains your own website. There, you can mention all your contact information, as well as the links to your pages on social networking sites. Many people, blinded by the “social hype”, forgot about this. A large poster for a campaign, with “Find us on Facebook” on it, instead of a well-chosen domain name for this campaign? Users will not find you very easily. Sending out a press release via e-mail, only including links like “Follow us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter”, without mentioning your own website? Another bad idea… However, such mistakes are more frequent than you might think!