Social Media Presence vs Website

Social Media presence is just as good as having your own website.
And the beauty is that you don’t have to pay for all that jargon that comes with a website!!

Why worry about domain names, hosting, SEO and all that other boring stuff when you can fire in a few hashtags and get loads of customers.

said nobody.

Ever.

Get a website.

Although you can create a business page on Facebook, you should never rely on this to generate leads.

It can be a brilliant way to drive traffic to your website if you use it to your advantage, a website in this day and age is a must for any business.

Let’s talk about a few things you need to know about websites and social media and how to use them to benefit you and your business …

1. Control

Social Media platforms all have their own algorithms which determine, who sees what, when, and how many times.

It’s simply your content, being exposed to a lot of people as they are scrolling through their own news feed.

So, the chances that someone is going to click on it and be engaged by it is rather remote.

And, even if someone clicks on it, if you don’t have a link to take that person to a platform entirely devoted to you and your business.

With your own website, you have full control of the content you put on there, what people see, and how people see it.

A strategically timed post onto social media with a snippet of catchy information will likely generate more interest than a Facebook ad. If that contains a link to a website or a blog, with some engaging content or some amazing deals then you potentially have some business.

2. Targeting your audience

90 percent of the time, we go onto social media to kill a bit of time or to have a nosy and see what your friends are up to.

We rarely go on there to look at something in particular, it’s just a news feed of randomly generated posts and ads that we tend to scroll through with little interest until a cute dog video catches our eye. Am I right? Just me? Ok moving on…

To stand out and get noticed you will need to either posts lots of cute dog videos or its going to need to be something really catchy to get someone to click on it.

When we want a specific service or product we tend to go straight to google and search for it.

You could have an amazing social media presence, with posts, and fans, and shares and pictures and videos etc… but unfortunately the highest results on a search engine are always going to be websites.

Which brings me to my next point…

3. SEO

Also knowns as ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ which is a way term used by many to attempt to enhance their ranking on search engines. It is used by website owners to drive traffic to their website.

So effectively you can manipulate your way up the search engine rankings by constantly monitoring and tweaking the words and phrases that will drive people to your website. Although this sounds daunting it can be a reasonably easy thing to do, if you so wish to put the time and research into your keywords and meta-tags, it is also a service to outsource to a specialist if you so wished.

If you tie all these things in together you will be onto a winner.

• Populate your website with interesting content, blogs, and products

• Post interesting updates to your social media with links to your website and blogs

• Keep on top of SEO and you can almost guarantee traffic to your site

None of the above is possible on Social Media – All Social Platforms, unless it is paid advertising you are beholden to their algorithms and visibility. Another reason why a Website is within you control and therefore more beneficial.

Keep in mind a Website can be built on a number of different platforms, some of which you own, some of which the website template or host own.
Some website builder templates like wix, shopify, GoDaddy website builder etc all continue to own your website platform and are not self-hosted (therefore meaning if you wanted to move away from using them you would need to start from scratch)! Which works perfectly fine for many but it’s worth knowing.

A standalone CMS platform, for example but not limited to Magento, WordPress, Joomla and ModX is all owned by you and having a website you own means you can control the hosting fees and ongoing costs.

The above is just something to be aware of, different website platform suit different businesses. We would always recommend using a self-hosted site to ensure you are in control.

by Danielle Holmes of Black Nova Designs (the marvellous team who look after Haynet’s website!)