Why a website is more important than a Social Media Page?

10 min readApr 23, 2021

We all love Social Medias and most of us have one. It is easy to use and people are attracted to it. Social Media is an easy way to target people and make them into customers, right? So, why do I still need to create a website for my business?

Professionally I am a marketer. I know what is the heart of a business and what is a business marketing tool. I have seen hundreds and thousands of business owners who are very much happy with their FB or IG or TikTok business page. As I said earlier, Social Medias are easy to use. They are created in a way so that people of all ages can use them. So, people use them to share their daily life experiences. These days using Social Media has become an addiction to people.

Now let’s read some business owner’s minds, especially some small business owners. Some of them think they can make use of people’s addiction and high usage of social media for their business growth. As a result, businesses lose great potential. No no….. I am not talking against Social Media. I’m just trying to say, business owners are just forgetting to differentiate the difference between the heart of any business and a tool to do marketing for that business.

Introduction:

A website is the heart of any business’s online presence. Social Media is just a marketing tool. It is not a mirror that should reflect your business. I have seen and talked with businesses that are happy to sell their products on FB marketplace and they don’t need any website for their business. To be honest, a professional business shouldn’t work like that.

I know social media are free to use and doing business from a social media page is also free. So, why should you bother and invest in domain name, design & development cost when you can do all your sales for free? Let’s talk about some reasons.

A website is your unique destiny and identity.

As an online business owner, you must need your unique destiny to showcase your products or services. When showcasing your products or services on a social media platform, your main goal becomes minor. It gets lost underneath your page’s status update, a bunch of product photos, promotional messages, quotes etc. Sometimes visitors lose their appetite to search for their desired pretty. Where on a website you can easily show your visitors or customers their desired products or services in the cleanest form.

Look, your customers go to your business location to see their desired stuff, not your business status. A great website will make your visitors happy, period.

You might think as a part of a web design agency, we are promoting our services and forcing you to make a website for your business. But this is not only for the sake of our business, it is for both of us. There are millions of small businesses that exist out there doing their business online or offline and from those millions, 64% of businesses have websites. And the number is increasing day by day.

Here I’m showing you some good and very informative facts about small businesses around the world,

People are bored seeing the same FB or Insta layout. If you choose the Facebook or Instagram business page path, then you must follow and decorate your business page within the guidelines offered by Facebook & Instagram. A website is the only way to show your creativity and the presentation of your products/services. Let me know, as a FB user when scrolling through your FB feed, do you like business pages and advertisements showing in the middle of your friends and family’s post? FB or Insta is a ‘connecting people’ platform, not a ‘connecting customer to business’ platform. A website is the right platform to connect your customer to your business.

A website is what you own.

If you have a website, you own that. You own that URL, the design, the images, the content of that website and you own the look of it. Your visitor will first see what you are offering them, not the same Facebook interface, logo, profile pic, cover pic, and your page’s updated status update, a bunch of uncategorized product images.

Whichever social media platform you choose, whether it is Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest or Twitter, they own the look of your own brand business page, not you. That particular platform owns your visitors, your images, your posts. The platform’s algorithm decides which business to show up on a search. It is entirely decided by that platform of who sees your page’s posts and when they see them.

So, as a business owner, you have to depend on the platform’s crucial algorithm, not the quality of your business. For this reason alone, choosing social media for your business is the worst strategy for web presence. If for any reason, a social media decides to remove your business page from their platform, they have the right to do it, you’ll have nothing to do to stand against that decision.

There are millions of Facebook business pages deleted from Facebook servers because of breaking the rules and regulations. When maintaining a Facebook page, you always have to follow some rules and regulations. Otherwise, your business page will be in the RED zone.

But with a website, you don’t have any boundaries, opportunities are limitless. No tricks or regulations to follow. You can do what you want and what you do best.

Take care of your visitor’s intentions

Facebook or Instagram’s main motto is to connect people. So, each time Facebook or Instagram updates their algorithm, they try their best to keep their news feed enriched with friends and family’s posts. Users of these platforms also don’t like any interruption in the flow. They don’t love to see a business ad or a business page’s post in between their friend’s status. That’s why Facebook and Instagram constantly finding a middle ground by showing fewer business posts and more F&F posts.

There is also a big thing that people or visitors find it very hard. Searching for a product is too hard on a Facebook page. Either you have to scroll through the page and waste several minutes to find the desired product.

It is a very irritating & awkward situation for an authentic customer. At one point, that authentic customer will have to leave the business page if he/she couldn’t find the product he/she is searching for. A clean website can get rid of this situation. A customer can simultaneously look at multiple products, discover Categories or search a product by the Search option integrated on the website.

With a Facebook or Instagram business page, you can’t read your visitor’s mind, their movement, or their intention. FB or Insta provides very little stat about visitor’s behavior. On the other hand, using a website as the gateway to your business makes it easier to understand your visitors and get the RAW data you need the most. FB analytic will not stand a chance against the mighty Google Analytics. This is yet another reason to create a website for your business and integrate Google Analytics into it. So, only with a website you can monitor a visitor's intention and take care of it.

Google Analytics Pro’s:

The Basic Version is Free
Allows for Highly Granular Data
Robust Reporting & Real-Time Analytics
Good Customer Support
Custom Dashboards & API
Can track different digital environments such as websites, mobile applications, apps, etc.
Can create custom goals and track your eCommerce platform
Can create custom reports based on your needs.

If you have a Facebook page, you just can’t benefit from all these Google Analytics features which are absolutely free. Plus, you can invest (if you are willing to) in Google Ads and place your business in the first place of a search on Google. So, you don’t limit the possibilities to Facebook or Instagram only.

A website is just PROFESSIONAL

What do you think? Do you think having a social media business page is smarter than a website? Sorry folks! You’re thinking it wrong. A business website is a place where you can reflect your professionalism, not on a social media page.

With a business website, you’ll get a professional business email address like admin@xyz.com. You’ll not get it from a Facebook page. Come on! Showing your professionalism isn’t a dumb decision when you can get it at a cost of $400-$500! It is less than your iPhone! At this price, you can get your Domain, Hosting, and a complete website! And you can offer your products or services 24/7 to the digital world and most importantly it will not be owned by any social media platform.

Don’t miss the SEO, Vast Marketing & Organic Traffic:

Having a great website means that your business can be blessed by SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is a strategy that can grow your website’s presence on search engines like Google or Bing. Statistic says that 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search which is referred to by search engines.

So, if a business comes out from the shell of a social media platform and makes a great website, it can gain a lot in terms of growth and sales. Here are some strategies to utilize your organic growth,

Create a blog that provides both informative messages and are valuable to your readers
Target your local audiences by implementing local SEO strategies
Choose the right keyword to rank on the search engines

If you closely monitor a random Google search, you’ll see that most of the time google shows 2–4 ads on the top of their SERP (Search Engine Result Page), and right after that organic results come up. Almost 90% of the clicks go to organic search results. So, if you have a website and do SEO for your website, there is a great chance to represent your website on top of a search result.

I know SEO takes time and ranking on the first page takes more than that. But why wait? You can get traffic even if you’re on the 3rd page of a search! Google doesn’t close the door there. You can use Google AdWords if you really want to show up your business for a certain keyword/s. But remember that, doing Google AdWords will cost you a good chunk of money. Whether or not you opt for the paid option with AdWords, my suggestion is to go for the free option, organic SEO. To be fair, more than 65% of business owners don’t know a thing about SEO. Fortunately, there are a lot of websites and tools out there from where you can easily learn SEO. Tools like Yoast SEO for WordPress will be a lifesaver for you and your business in the online world. Yoast SEO tool will help you to configure your site for Local SEO, News SEO, WooCommerce SEO (e-commerce platform for WordPress), Video SEO, and a lot more.

Websites like Search Engine Journal, Moz, Backlinko, Learning SEO, Udemy are willing to teach you SEO for FREE through their great and fruitful content. From these websites, you can easily learn SEO and implement it on your business website. (IF YOU HAVE A BUSINESS WEBSITE, NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA PAGE.)

Now, do you still dare to stick with your social media page or want to create a great website and grow your business?

Afraid of the cost?

The days are long gone when it a website costs $10,000 each! The market has become so much saturated and the competition has become so much aggressive. If you are a small business, don’t know a thing about coding but still willing to create your own business website, then you can have several great ‘DRAG & DROP’ website builders like Wix, Squarespace, etc. There you can create your own website for as low as $150 per year. But when all you have to do is ‘DRAG & DROP’, certainly there will be some downsides. Here are some of them listed above,

Pricing is more expensive than a web development agency
Lacks advanced marketing tools
Very little extension or Plugin support
No option to add any third-party extension or Plugin
Editing & adding content is difficult
Squarespace does not allow you to assign different shipping costs to different products.
No backend customization feature
Doing SEO is like HELL
No or very small Appstore compared to WordPress
Less Customizability
Not recommended if you want to migrate to another CMS later

There are many more technical downsides of them which I can’t include here.

Now, if you think you don’t have the time to go through all these processes or you’re thinking like, ‘I don’t want to learn how to do it, I’d love to let it done by the professionals, then don’t hesitate to contact us. Here is our pricing comparison compared to Squarespace or Wix or Shopify.

Conversations are higher on Websites than on Social Media

What is the goal of your business? Make sales, right? Now, imagine it is 3 a.m. and a visitor from another state came to your social media page, liked one of your products, and left you a message to buy that. By the time he/she left you that message, you are in deep sleep. That visitor knocked you but you didn’t respond.

He/she left 4 messages without getting any reply, left the page broken-hearted, moved elsewhere, and ordered that product from another place. At the end of the night, you lost a valuable customer. No visitor-to-customer conversation took place.

But if luckily you had a website, that customer didn’t have to leave your place and choose another business. So, the best way to convert is to let the visitor come to your website first, not your social media channel. Your website is your 24/7 salesperson. You don’t have to be present or have to map your customer how to order your product.

Conclusion — Do I really need a website?

Hopefully, I’ve successfully made you understand why you need a website instead of only dependent on social media. I’ve pinpointed many important reasons to choose a website over social media. Yes, making a website will make to pay some money. But at the cost of $300-$400, your business is guaranteed to serve your customers for 3–5 years long! I think that amount of money is far less than your iPad.

Your website belongs to you, not Mark Zuckerberg. Your website will be controlled by you, not any ALGORITHM. So, No more excuses. Dust off your website and make your business greater than ever. Complete the form at the bottom of this page and ask us to help build your first website with you!

Originally published at https://www.supremesupports.com.au on April 23, 2021.