Why social media is no replacement for a website

Whether your business is new or long-standing, you may be asking yourself if you really need to invest in a website, or if one or more social media accounts is enough to establish your online presence. Yes, Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok and others have their uses and are a great way to extend your reach to the audiences of those platforms, but they have significant limitations in how well they can serve you. So if you’re hesitant about putting time and money into a website, let me explain why you shouldn’t put all of your eggs into the social media basket.

Depth of Information

Have you ever searched a restaurant’s Facebook page for their menu? Scrolled through a business’s Instagram posts for detailed information about a particular product or service? It can be a fruitless exercise in frustration, my friends. If an internet search leads me to a business’s social media account, and there is no link provided for me to hop over to their website, I’m left thinking, ‘Is that all there is?’ I’m someone who feels the need to over research before making a decision. As a consumer of anything, I want detailed information that is easy to find. Searching through a company’s social media posts rarely satisfies those needs: it eats up too much time with little to no payoff. Result: I end up feeling frustrated with that business and I’m probably going to look elsewhere. The depth of information available in a social media account is nowhere near that of a website. Yes, I’m saying social media is shallow. It’s great for promoting special offers and events happening within a week’s time, but it’s severely limited in allowing you to build any kind of useful resource for potential customers. Websites allow you to provide all of the content that anyone could want, and, most importantly, to organize it in a way that is accessible, easy to navigate and user-friendly. With social media, your business is about as deep as your last three posts, because nobody is drilling down much further than that.

Establishing Legitimacy

People seek reassurance. They want to know before committing to your product or service whether your business is legitimate, trustworthy – real! A social media account that costs nothing and takes no time to set up doesn’t exactly instil that sense of trust. Many of us have seen, been suspicious of, or worse, been taken in by the too-good-to-be-true ads sprinkled throughout our social feeds. We frequently receive friend requests from people who don’t exist or who have ‘borrowed’ the identity of actual humans that we know. That social media is a well-known spreader of dodgy information is another reason for healthy skepticism. What I’m getting at is that, while I’m sure that most businesses on social media are legit, a lot of users, with good reason, approach what they see and read on their socials with caution. So while businesses can absolutely benefit from using social media, a website is a must to give you credibility – that reassurance that you are who you say you are, and you’re the kind of solid, professional company customers want to do business with.

Something else that you may not have considered is that having a website has become a must when it comes to hiring. A client explained to me that one of the main reasons his business needed a website was to be able to recruit new employees. Young grads do their research to determine if job opportunities are being posted by legitimate businesses, starting with looking at potential employers’ websites.

Your Brand

I need to underscore here that social media is a valuable marketing took when used skillfully. However, here is a cold, hard fact: all social media accounts look alike – in a word, ‘blah’. Social accounts are pretty much devoid of personality, ie. – they are very structured in a way that cannot take on the look and the feel of your brand. A website, on the other hand, is almost infinitely customizable. A great website design communicates your brand values, with just the right layout, colours, typefaces, visual content and functionality. A website allows you to shape the viewer’s experience during their visit, guiding them toward contacting you for a consultation, subscribing to your email list, booking a table, or buying that product. I know that I’m repeating myself when I say that your website is your digital front door. It’s your chance to make a good first impression by communicating what makes you unique and sets you apart from your competition. In many ways, a social media page can’t even come close to the brand-building potential of a website.

It’s a Control Thing

Yay – social media is free! It’s an appealing aspect, but when something is offered for free, the trade-off is… control. There is not much recourse when a social media platform changes its policies, rules, algorithms, appearance or functionality. You are not offered transparency or accountability from giant social media companies in terms of the way they may use or who can see your information.

Your website, however, is yours in every way, from ownership and control of your content, to your site’s appearance and the domain name that you register. You can methodically work to build the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website, so that it becomes easier to find and reaches more customers. And you can scale a website up as your business grows, which gives you the flexibility to add features like an online store or offer digital products, such as online courses.

It’s an investment

There’s no question that there are costs associated with creating and maintaining a website, but consider what not investing in a website for your business may cost – lost customers, sales, human resources and growth.

Use social media as a marketing tool to drive traffic to your website, but know that it is not replacement for a website.