This is an excellent article by Elliott Richmond, I think he left out one thing. You own your website. These social media website can and do change all the time but your own website is yours to control how ever you see fit. Why spend marketing money and effort to “See my Facebook page” instead of “Visit us at ScottiDesign.com.” Read on and enjoy and feel free to let us know what you think.
Good question right… Why would you need a business website when there is a multitude of social channels out there to promote your business? It costs nothing to setup an account and post promos about your next event, best buy, services and offers. A social network has a contribution system, you can converse with your audience via a commenting feed so it makes no sense to have a website when you have all this for free! Facebook is the most popular website in the world fact.
It’s a popular misconception that you don’t need a website for your business, product or services in my opinion but, I would say that I guess because I’m a web designer! However, I would urge you to continue reading for your own benefit and my piece of mind.
Consider this when you decide not to have a website for your business and services:
The audience you are connected with may only be your closest friends and colleagues
Your friends and colleagues are not necessarily your target audience, although they will support you in all that you do and there is a possibility that their friends will get exposed to your promotion there is a bigger audience out there.
The audience will only see your posts if they are online at the time of posting
News feeds, Latest Updates, Whats new… these are the features commonly seen in the social feed and they are just that. What you posted yesterday is not necessarily going to be there tomorrow. Unlike a website where you can feature content on the home page or feature a section on special offers or events.
The commenting and notification only happens if you subscribe to that feed
On certain social networks a like or a comment will automatically subscribe you to the conversation. However, that conversation can’t go on forever and as time goes by it just disappears into the ether unless you continue commenting of course but that could just look weird. Unlike a website that has a blog and gets indexed in search engines, browsed by new users, the conversation can continue for as long as the website is live.
It’s not free when you pay for advertising to promote on a certain network
Now this is a bonus, but you still have to pay for it in order to hit your target audience, if that’s your goal and you have deep enough pockets then I can’t really argue with that, I’d have to admit that this is the one thing going for social networks that is a key bonus for business – you can fine tune your target with the utmost precision … oh but wait! Where are you going to send them if you don’t have a website? You see what I did there huh
The content posted on most social networks doesn’t get indexed and presented in search engine results pages.
Ok so Facebook is the most popular website in the world yes but, is it the most useful? I don’t know about you but when I need to find something on the web I Google it! One thing that does happen if you have a website is that Google scans it and it goes into the Google index. When a user searches for something in Google they get presented with something called ‘search engine results pages’ or SERPS as we like to call it in the world of the web. If done correctly the content of your website (if you have one) will end up in the SERPS. Now you might have a few hundred friends on some of these networks but that’s kind of insignificant compared to the tens of thousands of visitors you could end up getting to your website right?
So my conclusion is – cool yes use social networks to promote your business or services but, don’t fall into that trap of thinking that it’s not important to have a bespoke website that reflects your business and portrays your business personality which will get indexed in Google and served to tens of thousands of potential customers.
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