3 Reasons Why Facebook can be your marketing enemy

The Scuba Industry, like many industries has become extremely dependent on facebook as a marketing platform & tool.

I have been carefully observing this phenomena and have some information to share, which I think would be useful to any dive shop, liveaboard, photographer or anyone promoting their brand. My main focus however will be on dive shops, centres & liveaboards.

So firstly, I’d like to loosely define ‘Dive Shop’ as any business that sells/rents scuba equipment, provides dive certifications, dive trips or all of the above and is a physical location.

Here are a couple of characteristics that unite all aforementioned ‘Dive Shops'.

1. They are completely locally targeted.

Whether it is someone from abroad searching for a suitable dive operation or whether it’s someone in your area, what unites them is local searches. For example, both your potential customer from a different continent and the diver down the road are going to search “scuba diving in ” or “dive centre in ”, or if the country is small enough, e.g: “open water course in ” etc.

The only alternative is that you would be ranking for world-wide/general terms like ‘what is scuba diving’. This is I believe to be bad strategy. In most cases even if you managed to rank for them, you wouldn't be able to convert them.

One of the issues with facebook is the low ability to be locally optimized. Surely, you can grow a following through friends and their posts, and frankly this is probably your best bet - if you are looking for an operation in your local area, but NOT when you are looking to travel to a new place.

2. The need for sales leads – not eCommerce purchases.

Unless you also sell online through your website, you probably just want to the customer to: find your business, be convinced that you provide a quality surface and show up at your location or alternatively give you a call or send you an email inquiry. If your counter-argument for that is that you sell equipment online, I believe this to be a mistake aswell, but that's a huge topic to discuss.

To sum up our main target

‘We need to rank for local searches that will convert to sales leads’.

Facebook Sin #1: Index unfriendly

If you notice, articles and images published on facebook never appear in search results. Try & remember, do you ever see facebook results in google? Perhaps the group or fan page will be included in the results but not the content published within it.

Try it. Google something like: 'Diving in ' or 'Dive Shop in ' or literally ANYTHING for that matter.

As a result, I see plenty of dive shops publishing really well written articles only on facebook – giving them no inbound traffic. Granted, it is likely to get shared within the facebook network – but having published this content in a blog first would have a lot more bang.

Here is an example of what ranks for 'Scuba Diving in Dubai'.

As you can see, 'Al Boom Diving' absolutely dominates that rather popular search term and most probably gets 90% of that search traffic.

Why Don't People Post on ther Blogs?

Problem #1: Bad Webmasters or Poor Platforms

In some cases, the person who really does have something to say just can’t do it. The people who built this site either built it in a way is too difficult for a lament to work with, or simply keep the client on a hook by not granting them access and educating them on how manage their own platform.

Problem #2: Lazy Users

In others, the users have a comfortable program like wordpress but its takes them 3 extra minutes to log in, get set up etc and once the article is written they have to then share it to Facebook & twitter as links etc. It takes more time, and a little more effort.

The EASY way is to just open up Facebook, new article and write away. Once its written, its already published on Facebook automatically – and if you have twitter connected it does that automatically too.

This is the bottom line: "Facebook content does not rank".

Any experienced digital marketer will confirm that the conversion rate for customers obtained through organic local based search is pretty much the gold mine of web trafffic. Why? Because there is business intent.

I can like a page on facebook without much thought, but when I am searching for something like "cheap diving in , I have clearly shown intent. I'm ready to spend money.