Should your business have a website or a social media page? Even in the social media-heavy 21st century, the answer is both and here is why.

1. Your professional image

Having your own website benefits your professional image in two ways. First, you are able to set the appearance and tone for everything from start to finish. This helps you to establish your brand identity and personality which will be a large part of any business’s drive to find customers.

Social media platforms allow you to share videos, images, and posts, but a good website reflects what is unique about your company. When done well, this sets you apart from the competition whereas on social media every company exists on a platform that looks exactly the same for every  other business.

Second, a well-built website establishes your credibility. Nearly every large, successful business currently in existence has a website that they have invested in. Having a website of your own puts you among their company.

2. Building email lists

Social media can do a lot of things for your business, but there is one important thing that it is not very good at which is setting up email subscriptions. When it comes to your business, your clients, and how you can contact them, email addresses are the only thing which have stood the test of time and cannot be taken away if a social media platform loses popularity or disappears entirely.

A well-built website will be able to help you gather email addresses. Your list of email addresses, in turn, can be used to target audiences in ad campaigns on social media. Using a website and social media page in this way is one example of the kind of synergy you should build between your website and your social media pages.

3. Effectively communicating your message

This point is a little more abstract from a marketing standpoint, but it is still highly important. Social media platforms offer some structure for putting information before customers, but not nearly as much as your own website. At the end of the day, your social media page is a conglomeration of posts, videos, and images which is really only ordered based on the time you posted everything.

Orchestrating what your audience will see first, or determining what they will see after in order to help convert your visitors into customers is just not something that can be done on social media with the same control offered by your own website.

Converting visitors into customers requires persuasion, so your website should tell a story about why they should choose your company. This may require pop-ups, buttons to different pages or sections of your website placed strategically throughout, etc. A website done well will do exactly this, but it is not possible on social media platforms.

4. Making information easily navigable

In addition to orchestrating the way in which your company is presented to visitors, a website gives visitors control over the information they want to find. When visitors see your social media page, the information they can easily find is limited.

Facebook shows the last things you posted and makes reviews easily accessible, but if your visitors want to find information that you have not shared recently then they will be left to scroll aimlessly through your page until they find it (something they are not likely to do). The rest of the social media platforms besides Facebook are even less navigable for when visitors want to find information.

A well constructed website will both anticipate the information your visitors will want, and will be easily navigable with clearly marked pages and sections for when your visitors want to find something. If there is enough information for your clients to search, it is not a bad idea to have a search bar on your website (something which a social media page does not have).

5. Better anticipating what your clients will be after

If your visitors want regular updates on certain topics, websites can offer specialized email subscriptions whereas social media will only show every single thing you post to your timeline if visitors subscribe to your social media page.

If you want your visitors to be able to send you an email without actually knowing your email address (which they often will not know), you can put an email form on your website whereas social media platforms offer specialized direct messaging which leaves your business with decentralized messages to keep up with. If your visitors want to download pdfs of some bit of information, that is something which you can make possible on your website which you cannot do on most social media platforms.

I could keep listing stuff like this, but you probably get the idea.

Conclusion

When it comes to social media versus a website, the answer is that a good business should have both and use them both well. Websites and social media platforms offer distinct purposes which can help your business build a comprehensive presence online which will ultimately create new customers.

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