Small and medium sized businesses have limited resources for marketing and web development. So naturally the question arises: should it invest anything at all in its own website when commerce and marketing and customers all seem to be shifting to Facebook? One company, albeit a non profit publishing venture, went through that reasoning process and decided that yes, Facebook was the better choice. The Rockville Central blog - named after the Maryland city it covers - stopped publishing new content on their Web site in March and began posting to Facebook, the Washington Post reports.

Two months later the publishers say that more readers are interacting with the stories through comments or “likes” than they were when the blog was a stand-alone Web site. Also Facebook posts that promote Rockville Central stories are netting nearly 2,000 “impressions” each. With the old site, the traffic was about 600 views per article per month.

What About Mobile?

Perhaps even a year ago or six months ago the decision, based on the Rockville blog's experience and many others, would have been a no brainer for SMBs. However mobile is increasingly competing for marketing and web development dollars and companies must carefully consider which channel will deliver the most impact. Google tells of the website Kiddicare.com as an example. A UK online nursery and baby supply retailer, it noticed a growing number of visitors to their website via mobile - consumers that were getting a poor purchasing experience on mobile. So with approximately 7% of their traffic coming from mobile devices, they decided to build a website optimized for mobile. Since March - coincidentally the same month that Rockville Central switched to Face book - Kiddicare.com has seen a 36% increase in traffic.

The site was entirely in-house using existing IBM WebSPhere infrastructure.