Websites vs Social Media Pages

Let’s start with dividing our customers into two groups:

I wrote this blog in 2013 and the subject matter is as topical now as it was then. Small businesses still ask the same questions about social media, so please enjoy my opinions from a time before Moshi (and essentially unchanged).

I would like this to be a fair and balanced discussion about a topic quite controversial in the small business world. Having an online presence is pretty much a given in today’s trading environment but how you go about it is a different matter entirely. Having to invest time and money polarises opinion, then business owners or management generally lack the skills to work out if their decision is the right one. Who to ask for advice is equally unclear. Lack of product knowledge or simple self-interest lie at the core of this issue, which is a good time for me to reveal my own interests. I must confess, I am an online marketing consultant and part of my job is building websites. However, just because I build website doesn’t make my opinion invalid. To be successful in what I do, I have to do much more than this. Honest, informed advice is my speciality. A flashy website may not be what your business needs, but if I can contribute in any way to the growth of your business, then it follows I will grow with you. After all, we are in this big journey together.

As for my advice, take it or leave it. What follows is a good old compare and contrast between using social media as you sole online marketing tool or having a website to promote a business. Before I start, I would like to be clear by saying that I strongly believe a combination of the two is the best preference by far, but this blog is for those tackling the issue of whether to invest in a website or not.

1. Cost

At the moment having a business presence in social media is free. Anyone can start a page from their own personal social media account and within a blink, start promoting their business to literally millions of people. It seems like a dream come true. With a little work you can build a fan base and start extending your marketing influence. You still haven’t spent a cent. Successful players in this game have a tendency to shout the praises of social media from the rooftops, belittling any advice to the contrary. That is not surprising – zero cost marketing is the ‘golden fleece’, but as you must realise, cost is measured by far more than dollars alone.

A good website, on the other hand, can easily cost more than $2000 and then the sky is the limit. To be fair, something promoting your business to the online world 24 hours a day, every day of the week probably deserves a little more spent on it than what it costs to hire a temp for two weeks. There are free alternatives, such as template websites, but these suffer from similar problems to social media pages. What spending money online gives you is control, which is the next major consideration.

2. Control

Content at first appears to play on the side of social media. Once you get your business page online you can start posting about your products or services using a simple to use interface. Customers can comment and your content starts to evolve all by itself. The ease of use and simplicity of design gives the impression that you are in complete control of what is going on. However, this is far from the truth.

We quickly forget that social media websites are themselves businesses. They are profit-driven and work hard to develop and promote their brand. An example was last year when Facebook changed the default viewer setting to ‘Most Popular’ on their newsfeed, meaning that many business updates would no longer show, and introduced a paid ‘Promote’ service, hoping to profit from the restriction. Also, if a business breaks one of the social media site’s rules, its page can disappear overnight without opportunity for recourse. All that hard work gone in a blink. Then you may have the additional problem of the troll that who gets onto your page and sprawls their filth all over it, damaging your efforts and your brand. Don’t think the social media site will lose any sleep over this; they are committed to protecting one brand only and it’s not yours.

Websites can become unstuck too, but again usually because you can’t get something for nothing. After countless hours of work setting a free template website up, many business owners suddenly realise they don’t own the rights to their own efforts. Not only are they artistically bound by the templates imposed, they fall victim to the package’s conditions and in the end don’t own anything at all. Free websites can be an easy, quick way to get an online presence but don’t invest too much time and effort in them unless you can take your work with you later down the road.

At the end of the day, control costs money. Nothing can currently compare to having your own website. Branded well, planned rationally and filled with relevant content, a website successfully carries the message of your business to the whole world. Content management systems give total control over the text and, as long as hosting fees are paid, there is very little apart from government intervention that can remove the site from the web. Forking out a whole bunch of money doesn’t ensure success though. Success is all about traffic.

3. Traffic

Most Generation-Y user’s have over 500 Facebook friends. That means if you can get one Y Generation person to ‘like’ your business Facebook page then it can potentially be seen by 500-plus people. If those 500+ think it’s worth paying attention to, they will ‘like’ it as well, also remembering that each of these people have 500+ friends. In only a matter of moments 250,000+ people could have exposure to your page. Things can go viral and in no time your business is being talked about by morning shows all over the world. This is the kind of promotion money simply cannot buy. This is the gift alluded to earlier on, the ‘golden fleece’ social media has given us. But can you run a business on this model?

Predicting whether a post will go viral is impossible. Think about the millions of posts that go online everyday and the mere handful heard about in the mainstream media. That makes planning for it impossible too. Don’t let that deter you. You can’t have a viral post if you don’t post, so do post and see what happens. Tread carefully, though. Quantity matters but so does quality, so posting loads of gibberish can have the opposite effect to what you want. Timing is also central to success so finding your market in the social media world can be harder than it first appears. Lastly, it requires constant momentum, meaning ongoing work at the keyboard. Energy has to be pumped into social media because you are motivating the user to act. The user is actually on the site to communicate with friends and family, not purchase products and services. If need be, energy can be substituted for money, advertising to targeted groups of social media users, but this is not as effective as interacting with your own fan group and makes it much, much harder to go viral. Some industries will also have difficulty finding any kind of hold with social media. How many users need a cemetery plot or concrete form work done?

The active online customer uses search engines to hunt for what they want efficiently and effectively. This presents quite a problem for business pages in social media. Why? Because social media is not searchable. These business pages exist within a closed system so the little bots running around the web listing everything can’t find them. Social media pages cannot take advantage of search engines, directories, maps, or steer-in web traffic using paid advertising like web pages can. And the restrictions of social media pages doesn’t stop there. (NB: In 2014 Facebook opened their platform to Google so page appeared on search results, though these still generally show under established websites).

Owning a website and using search engine advertising gives the business owner a wide array of tools not available to social media users. These tools are crucial for determining the success of your efforts. What these tools give you is something to quantify, otherwise known as results.

4. Results

Without something to measure our efforts, the business owner blunders around in the dark. We can’t get into the heads of our customers or clients so we have to glean what we can from their habits to hopefully predict their behaviour. The more information we have, the better. Social media has come a long way, offering a number of different statistical measures, such as number of visits or how many people are talking about your page, plus breakdowns into age, sex, etc. All this is valuable market data.

When compared to the treasure trove of tricks you can play with a website, social media’s offerings start to look a little meagre. Websites tell you volumes about visitor habits, while paid advertising gives insights into market behaviour as a whole. Accumulate this data over a year and you have an excellent overview of search and traffic trends which are invaluable to marketing plans.

Better still, owning a website allows businesses to think a little laterally about obtaining data. One way of measuring, for example, if a QR code is worth putting on your business card is to create a special landing page that can only be entered by using the code. Divide the number of cards given out by the number of unique visitors to the QR page and you have a percentage measure of its usefulness. This kind of simple and effective data-gathering is not possible with social media sites because you are working within their fixed system.

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