A question that can often come up when speaking about your website is are your social media pages more important than your website? That depends on the strategy behind your use of your website and social media channels.
The benefits of your website over social media
One way to look at this is that your website is your home, it’s where all the main information about your business is and it’s your opportunity to sell to potential customers! This could be a sale in the sense of an online purchase, or your chance to sell your services and get enquiries via your website. Your website is where people can find out more about you and your business and ultimately decide if you’re the right fit for them.
Whilst you can control the content you post on social media, you cannot control the user experience, which is broadly the same in terms of how the channels operate – you can only control what you put out on each channel. You also don’t own the platform, you own your website. If Facebook or Instagram decide to change something and it doesn’t fit with your strategy – that’s pretty much tough, and you have to adapt to it. With a website – you own the whole thing and you can control the style and the end-to-end experience for your potential customers.
You can tailor the content on a website
You’re not limited to a certain character count or size of the image – you can do with it as you wish. With that in mind, you can tailor the content to your users to make sure they get the information they need.
Whilst you can pin a post or you can highlight certain company information on your social channels, your website content will stay the same and not move down the feed when you update the site. By their very nature, social media channels are very transient and the content moves quickly so you need to keep refreshing the content in order for the message to be present.
You can optimise your website for search
Whilst you might be able to get your social media profiles and posts searchable in a Google search, it’s less easy to control. With a website, you can do Search Engine Optimisation to ensure that your content is found in the search engines. You can tailor the keywords to your business, and ensure that your content is found and ranked highly by the likes of Google.
So are social media pages not important?
Absolutely not, I’d suggest that like with all marketing, your social media pages should work in tandem with your other channels – and that includes your website. It’s worth thinking that your social channels are a mouthpiece of your business and a way to reach new audiences, then bring them back to your “home”, ie: your website.
If you’re wondering how to get the best out of your website, contact us for a free consultation to look at how you can improve your content and start to improve your online presence.
