A bold and possibly bonkers move by Business Forms Express, which is ditching its website in favour of using a Facebook page instead as its online 'face'.

I'm intrigued to see how this pans out. To my mind a Facebook presence makes sense for consumer-facing print brands such as Moonpig. And the industry's most famous example of leveraging the purchasing potential of the 500m-plus people in the Facebook community is surely Tim Messom at KMCA, with his 'save Tim from bankruptcy' Facebook group that's still going strong now, almost two years on from its inception. With more than 15,500 friends (that's 12,000 more than Moonpig has, by the way) Tim would probably be able to retire if all his chums were regular customers. They aren't of course, but his Facebook idea definitely helped him turn things around. And a lot of his business is indeed directly with consumers ordering canvas prints of their own pics of friends, family and pets, etc, so it works well for him.

Meanwhile, back in the world of B2B print, I'm of the opinion that a Facebook page is not, repeat not, an essential requirement for most print businesses. It's incredibly irksome when 'experts' stand up at conferences, talk knowingly about social media and start saying things like "I checked 100 printing companies and only five of them had a Facebook page" in a pejorative way. Why on earth should they have one?

A Facebook page or group is a completely pointless exercise for many printcos. And a lame page just-because-you-think-you-should, that nobody's actually interested in, is worse than no page at all. Also consider that plenty of companies, my employer included, do not routinely allow staff to access Facebook on their work computers, either.

Meanwhile, back with Business Forms Express I know of no other firm that has made such a bold move. I can, though, see the attraction for an SME of being able to easily update and customise their web presence using Facebook's many facilities. For free.

Some pertinent comments have already appeared on PrintWeek's news story about some of the possible downsides. My own advice is to add a few more pictures of the sort of products the company can produce, and few less of people down the pub.

Good luck to them. A diary note has been made to follow up later in the year.