Anon OpinNot everyone can afford a smartphone. Stop making it the primary, and sometimes the only, interface for day to day services. It's like when companies move their customer facing information onto Discord. It's shit. Fucking stop it.
Maria Langer | 📝💎🌵🛥️@anon_opin @dbsalk Ditto for Facebook. If Facebook is the only way you communicate with customers, you won't be communicating with me because I won't be a customer.
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UKone of the saddest things I see is when small businesses neglect their independent website for Facebook, and then don't even bother to update the bit of FB that you can see without having a login, to the point you don't even know if the business is still operating as their last post is 3 years ago!
I think the wider problem is a lot of business owners don't really *want* to communicate with their customers (and then wonder why they go bust within a few years)
@vfrmedia @anon_opin @dbsalk I think you're right, at least on some level. But I also truly believe that small business owners think all they need to do to build a business is put themselves on a site like Facebook and sit back and wait for the customers to come. Same goes for Instagram and Twitter and anything else. They don't seem to care that these platforms do not give them exposure to ALL potential customers.
I deleted my FB, Messenger and Instagram accounts some months ago - one thing I noticed when I was using them is Messenger is *not* reliable for the level of real-time messaging you would need for a business transaction (even compared to SIgnal, SMS or a telephone call).
And FB will equally direct people to their competitors, and in a small country like England has 0 sense of geography/distance (this is a very common flaw with all USA developed social networks)
Andrew (Television Executive)@vfrmedia @mlanger @anon_opin @dbsalk as a business owner (with websites) I tend to try to spend more time running my business than dealing with either social media or my website.
Both are huge burdens that are neccisary to doing business while actively taking time away from the business in which I am trying to engage.
And i say that as someone who is good at these things.
@ajroach42 @mlanger @anon_opin @dbsalk
thing is you still put in the effort, and have a physical presence which shows your businesses are definitely active - I can see that all the way from England!
Many businesses round here don't even do that, if you try and telephone them often no one answers, in some cases you could physically visit them but its not always feasible or worth the effort if they are some distance away...
@ajroach42 @vfrmedia @anon_opin @dbsalk I agree with you 100%. I did have social media for my businesses and abandoned it. I still have a website for my jewelry business, but it has become such a hassle to update my work on that site as well as my online shop site that now I just pretty much point everyone to my online shop.
I'd rather run my business, make new inventory, and have a life than try to keep up with social media for the one or two new customers it might generate in a month.
@mlanger @ajroach42 @anon_opin @dbsalk
both of you do still update both the indie website and the online shop regularly (accounting for the fact that hand made jewellery and toys aren't made overnight)
and even publish actual telephone numbers and physical addresses, which for many small businesses is becoming rare these days - plus you have genuine, high quality products which are verifiable.
I see too many businesses round here (especially linked to social media channels) where the owners are clearly drop shipping same stuff from Amazon and Ebay (maybe with their own branding), they never publish where their business is located, and make it hard to contact their customer service if anything goes wrong with shipments etc..
@vfrmedia @ajroach42 @anon_opin @dbsalk Oh, yes. My business website contains contact information, including a phone number (I think). I'm also religious about updating the calendar of events, which is where people can find out what art shows I'll be at. That's all done automagically by embedding the Google calendar on the webpage; every time I update the calendar, the page is updated. Occasionally I'll add a post about an upcoming show I'm excited about or a new style of earrings I'm making.
@vfrmedia @ajroach42 @anon_opin @dbsalk Arbitrage is a thing. People will find products on Amazon and advertise them for sale at slightly higher prices. All they need to do is order the item and have it shipped directly to the seller, leaning hard on prime shipping to ship for free. I've been bitten by this in the past; I purposely did not buy an item on Amazon but the person I bought it from had it drop shipped from Amazon, pocketing the $10 price difference. I was extremely pissed off.
@vfrmedia @anon_opin @dbsalk EXACTLY! All of this.
I ditched Facebook when I realized that I was not seeing all of the posts shared by the people I followed or "friended." I was seeing a lot of other stuff in random order.
I also got a real close look at how many of the people I actually knew IRL who had Nazi, fascist, or just plain idiotic political leaning.
The only thing that annoys me as a non-Facebook user is that FB Marketplace has pretty much destroyed the utility of craigslist.