On the surface it makes a lot of sense, replacing your website with Facebook.

Facebook offers some great features; event management, community-based commenting, notes (replacing larger News articles and Pages), status updates (replacing smaller news updates), photo galleries and more. The best part? It's free! Plus all of this will be instantly integrated with many people's main source of social networking time wasting, certainly in Australia. Although not everyone's.

Let's dig a little deeper...
 

Your Brand?

Facebook allows minimal control over your style, over your brand - part of the whole point of having a strong web presence. This lack of control is a great advantage to Facebook over MySpace (ugh, the horrors!) most of the time, but for your own professionally crafted website to represent your brand? Probably not.

To me the URL says it all. Sure you could redirect your domain onto your Facebook page, but you're still ending up at the same place: www.facebook.com/your-brand - a subset of another brand? Not a very strong message, and what if Facebook's brand becomes tarnished or controversial, how does that affect your brand?

From a search engine optimisation (SEO) perspective, a website provides a greater range of keywords and pages, the potential to capture different audiences. Of course, all of this can be customised to your exact liking if you're really getting serious about SEO too. Facebook's social structure isn't built for this kind of search engine interaction, which is fine for what Facebook is - a social platform.
 

The future?

Of course this is a lot of talk about a single social platform, but who knows what the future will bring? Will Facebook fall out of favour and in it's place a new platform? Would you migrate your data across? What data? How? Some food for thought.

Just as with mailouts, and other forms of communication, use social platforms to carry your relevant messaging and drive your community back to your website, but above all use social platforms for being interactive with your community!

Now, perhaps strangely, you can comment on this post via Facebook comments below :p There is a big difference between a Facebook integration and a failure at an organisation's web strategy, though!

We've recently setup our own Solutions Outsourced Facebook page too, come say hi there, if not just below!