The Death Of The Microsite

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At least I think so.

Traditionally, when we wanted to heavily advertise a major event, Sugar Creek would invest time in creating a microsite to promote it. We’d buy a vanity url, then buy and re-skin a wordpress theme. Every printed piece, all church email, or Facebook message would point to that site. We’d run the promotion 4 to 5 weeks out from the event. The event would come and go, and the microsite would just turn into a dead page.

Then came Facebook.

In January we decided to try something new. We created a microsite and a Facebook page for a message series about love. One platform was way moresuccessful than the other. Can you guess which one?

On Facebook, we created a fan page just for this event. We ran an ad campaign on Facebook as well. When the ads expired, we had 4 million page impressions and almost 800 clicks.

We ended up with 452 fans of the page. More importantly, we had people interacting. And they are still interacting on this page even though the series ended a couple of months ago.

There are at least 5 reasons why I think Facebook works better than a microsite:

Our members are already on Facebook. They don’t just have an account. They hang out there. They talk. They play. According to Nielson online, they spend an average of 7 hours a month on Facebook, which is roughly 14 minutes a day. I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s more time than they spend on a microsite.

Facebook is mobile. More than 100 million active users are accessing Facebook through their mobile device.

Every message you send to a fan appears on that person’s wall. Free advertising.

A fan page can be created in as little as 5 minutes. And with the use of FBML, you can customize your page. You can check out Sugar Creek’s fan page here.

Fans can easily promote the fan page to their friends. They can like posts and suggest the page to others.

The statistics are overwhelming, but it’s hard to argue with the numbers. Hands down, Facebook wins.

What do you think? Is Facebook replacing traditional online means of advertising?

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