Social media plays an essential role in developing a brand online. It brings recognition, enhances communication with the audience, increases sales, and gives many other advantages.
Moreover, anyone can easily set up an account there and pay nothing whatsoever. That is why many small companies count exclusively on promoting their brand pages on social networks while practically disregarding website development.
However, in my opinion, this approach is wrong, poses risks in the long term, and limits business opportunities in terms of growth and marketing. I will explain why in this article below.
What is wrong with pages in social networks when it comes to business promotion
First of all, the main disadvantage is that your social network account does not actually belong to you. Read the terms and conditions on any platform, and find out the platform can restrict your page anytime and without explaining the reasons. It does not matter how “well-leveled up” your account is and how many followers you have gathered around your page.
Everything you have invested in for years and spent a lot of time and money on can cease to exist literally in the blink of an eye.
Limited capabilities are another disadvantage. You can use only the functionality provided by the platform and nothing more. Even if it is about your company’s page design in social networks, the possibilities will be quite limited.
Finally, social networks provide very insufficient organic growth for your business. Even if we talk about the followers on your profile, only a small present of them see your posts in Facebook’s algorithmic feed. Telegram, however, has basically no capabilities to provide organic growth.
As a result, you have to invest in advertising on the social platform constantly. Otherwise, there will be practically no chance to grow, especially if you are engaged in a business that has no viral potential in principle, for instance, most B2B.
To say more, business pages on social media, in my opinion, suffer from numerous bots.
They create the problem of so-called “vanity metrics,” when you can have tens of thousands of followers and likes but, at the same time, no return for your business.
No sales, no conversions.
What are the pros for your business in owning a proprietary website
Your own website is the basis of your brand on the Internet. It is where traffic sources from all other channels should flow, including the social networks mentioned above.
The first advantage of running your proprietary website is having complete control over it. It is a kind of online real estate. The domain name and all the files saved on the website belong to you as the business owner.
By the way, you can choose a specific domain name that sounds like your brand name, for example, Shopify.com instead of https://www.linkedin.com/company/shopify/, with the focus still on the platform where you created the company page.
The next advantage of having your own website is that you practically have no risks of restrictions or deletion, as is the case with social networks. You can post any information on it without limits commonly described in that or another platform’s terms and conditions.
Another good point is complete freedom to implement functionality and appearance on your proprietary website. Developers can implement almost any capabilities on it for you. They can implement them from scratch or use out-of-the-box solutions.
Say, there are thousands of plugins for WordPress. They allow you to add numerous supplementary functions to your website running on this CMS.
It is also true about the design. Your website’s appearance can reflect your company’s identity, and you can change any design elements if you need to.
To round out the picture, your own website can receive organic traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.
Any company website optimized in compliance with SEO requirements, filled with quality content, and worked on to promote it will appear in the search engine results according to relevant keywords and generate traffic and sales.
Let us summarize
Your proprietary website on your dedicated domain is the basis of modern branding and business promotion on the Internet. Developing a website for a business requires money and time investments, but they will fully pay off due to the advantages listed above.
Moreover, your own website increases trust in your company. After all, unlike pages in social networks, it is more laborious to make a website, and companies able to implement such projects have a higher credit of trust from potential customers.
If you have created a website, want to engage in its SEO promotion, and attract traffic and customers from Google searches, write to me, and let’s talk about the details.
Volodymyr Fedorychak
Search marketing consultant specializing in IT business and B2B SaaS. I help businesses and start-ups generate traffic, attract customers and build their brand online.
