Today I ran out of gel top coat. Not that I don’t have about 20 other bottles of gel top coat. Several of which, frankly, I like very much and know exactly where and how to obtain more of. But the one I ran out of today I was pretty fond of. Despite recently discovering that the bottle it was in wasn’t even powder-coated black, but merely painted. I discovered this earlier when I dribbled top coat over the edge and tried to clean it up with an acetone-soaked cotton pad...oops. It’s no longer an opaque bottle. But (shrug) it’s still in an amber bottle and I keep it in the drawer anyway.I would totally have bought more of this top coat — if I had a clue how. For one thing, I bought it at a tradeshow. It has a rather generic sticker on it that says “UV gel top coat .5 oz.” That sticker didn’t survive the acetone bath incident. Neither the sticker — nor any other part of the bottle —lists anything resembling a company name or contact information.
I did pick up a business card from the booth where I found the top coat. It has a Facebook page. I’ve been to the Facebook page; it hasn’t been updated in over a year. The Facebook page is also not a “page,” it’s a “profile” so I can’t simply “like” it, I have to send it a friend request and get approved — which isn’t worth much from a profile that doesn’t get updated.
But, most importantly, the Facebook page does not have the “about” information filled out. There is no physical address of the supply house, no phone number, no website, no way to contact this company so that I can purchase more of their private-label gel top coat, which I liked just fine.
So I’ll continue to use one of the other brands that I also like just fine and also can reliably obtain.
Next year I’m sure this company will not be at the tradeshow, since they’ll probably figure that it wasn’t worth the money because it didn’t get them any new customers. (Rolling my eyes.)
This has become pretty common with small companies, though. This is hardly the first or only example of a business that has not only failed to direct traffic to a professional website where customers can actually purchase goods via mail order, but also failed miserably to even use Facebook properly.
There are plenty of people out there — Facebook itself, included — who will be happy to lecture you about the importance of creating a PAGE for your business instead of a PROFILE. It is easier if you have a page for a business, you won’t max out how many people you can connect with (you only get 5,000 “friends” with your profile), and the people who want to connect to your business don’t have to wait for approval of a friend request to keep up to date with you...but what really kills me is how many people with brick-and-mortar businesses who want their Facebook pages to bring business their way don’t bother to fill out all that info in the “about” profile area.
If you do online sales, you can’t do that from Facebook. So get a real website. Already have one? Then why isn’t it listed on your Facebook profile?
Then people ask me, “Maggie? Do you really get business from your Facebook page?”
Well yeah, I do. And I’m not even trying to sell gel top coat.
Print | posted on Monday, January 07, 2013 11:42 AM