I’m on Social Media. Why Have a Website?

We all know, a website is an essential part of business today, it provides information about your business and drives prospect clients to take action, such as buy your product or service. You may have a beautiful, dynamic desktop website, but if it’s not mobile-friendly, in other words, automatically adapt to the size of the mobile screen, you’re missing out on an important part of your online presence.

If businesses have such a widely accepted online presence, why do they need a website as well?

Well, here are the things that social media can do and what a website does better:

Social Media is a Marketing Tool. Social media platforms allow businesses to interact with their customers daily. Businesses can brand themselves on Facebook, giving a personality to their business. They can show the lifestyle that goes along with it on Instagram. All these tools allows customers to feel connected with businesses because they see brand updates in the same place they see updates from friends and families.

Social media allows customers to interact directly with a business, knowing that they will get a human being responding through the internet, often immediately.

Businesses take advantage of this tool to build relationships with their current customers and reach a vast audience of potential customers. There are more than one billion people active on Facebook – which means one billion potential audience members!
Social media is so popular and effective because it is free and requires no technical or coding know-how. Anyone, anywhere can use it to create an online presence. It’s mobile-friendly, and customers are often on their own social media pages multiple times a day. Social media dependence means that customers willingly expose themselves to subtle advertisements every day.

However, the real power of the online presence is in the website. To put it simply, social media may be the mouth of a business, but the website is the brain.

A Website Offers Complete Control. When a website is designed for a business, every aspect of it is built to reflect their brand, their products, their logo, and the lifestyle that is at the heart of their identity. With social media, a brand must represent itself under the giant umbrella of whatever social media platform they are using. A website offers pure representation and an added atmosphere of professionalism that comes with a domain name.

On a website, a business can set up a personalized shop, selling their product directly to their customers. On a social media page, the customer must take the extra step of leaving the page and follow a link to another site. Everything is in one place on a business’s personal webpage.

Websites Have the Upper Hand in Internet Searches. For example: If you own a gift shop in Temecula, CA, you can use the words “gift shop” and “Temecula” multiple times throughout your site. Search engines such as Google will then crawl your website, see those keywords and put your site in the search results that appear when someone in Temecula searches “Gift shops near me.”

This kind of website traffic is highly valuable. Think about it – these are people who are already searching for the product or services you offer. When your website shows up in those search results, you are putting yourself in front of the people already in the market who are therefore more likely to convert into a paying customer. Even though Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter seem like they will be around forever, the world has seen social media platforms fall out of popularity over the years.

If a business has a website, they are not at the mercy of the trends. Businesses do not need to worry about the chance of Facebook losing popularity and then them having to rebuild their online presence from scratch. A website has a permanence that social media cannot guarantee. Our take away? Invest in a Website for Your Business!