Let me start by saying I love, love, love Facebook. However, there’s an alarming trend happening that I feel compelled to tell you about, which involves stores locking up all their content inside of Facebook.

Over the past couple of years specialty stores have been doing an amazing job with their Facebook page. They have reserved their “friendly” Facebook address, customized their homepage and frequently upload content and photographs. Unfortunately, all this great content is often only on Facebook and not present in their site – anywhere. The person benefiting from all of this is of course is Facebook and not the retailer.

Retailers need to develop a strategy where all content, imagery and videos reside in their site first and then is propagated to sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Let’s face it developing content is expensive and you want to be sure you get the biggest bang for your buck as possible. This involves making sure the content you write is always included in your site and then pushed to your favorite social media outlets. Failing to do so will result in others getting rich off of you content instead of you!