Website or social media, which one is more beneficial for your business?

One of the ongoing debates within a marketing team is the question of where should the company focus on more, its website or socials?

Accompanying questions to that one are: Which of the two generates the most potential customers? Which channel provides bigger ROI? Or, which of them helps the company to grow faster?

If you want to know the answers to these and more related questions, keep reading! We are diving into an analysis of both platforms and pitting them against each other.

What is Social Media?

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Social networks or social media has become a given in a our daily lives. It is mainly used to communicate or interact with each other online. Social media has significantly grown in popularity this past decade, not only among individuals, but also businesses.

Let’s break down the name as an initial attempt to understand social media better.

“Social” – from the Latin “socius”, which means “friend”. So being social means being friendly.

“Media” – again comes from the Latin “medius” which means middle. So media is a communication mediation tool used to store and disseminate information or data.

Going from the basic definitions, we get this one “Social networks are applications or platforms where people or groups of people (businesses) socialize with their audience.”.

This is actually the best way to use social media. Many companies make the mistake of posting lengthy, yet not friendly content on social media.

You might be asking yourself now: How can I be friendly on social media?

For your content to be friendly or social, it must meet these 3 criteria:

1. Be interactive or engaging,
2. Connect people or maintain connections,
3. Provide value to all parties included in this social exchange.

If you’ve marked all three with a “check”, then you are using social media exactly for what it was created.

Like everything else, both social media and website, have their advatantges and disatvantages. We want to put these side by side and see if we get a winner!

Advantages of Social Media

Free

The main advantage of social networks is that you can use most of them for free. The opposite is true for websites, where there is a cost for development and maintenance. Not only can you use social media for free, but you can also share your content with a wide audience for free.

Ready-made

All that’s left for you to do on social media is to upload a “media” of your liking. You don’t need to worry about building it because it is all ready-made for you.

Disadvantages of Social Media

Paradoxically, the disadvantages of social media come from its advantages. So don’t be quick to assume that I have mistakenly written the same thing twice. Na uh…

So, the disadvantages of social networks are also that they are:

Free

Despite the fact that you can use social networks for free, their algorithm needs to push your content into visibility. You can help make this happen through paid campaigns and advertisements. Year after year, this form of paid marketing is getting costlier. You can use socials for free, but you need to pay to play!

Ready-made

Social networks are standard, pre-made, and pre-modeled pages that store content and allow for small changes such as personalization of the cover and profile pictures, and content. They provide only a superficial promotion of your brand. Social media doesn’t necessarily do much in raising brand awareness or loyalty, and even if not used properly, it can even cause your business identity damage or loss.

What is a Website?

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A web page is a collection of intertwined internet pages under the same domain name, which is accessible to visitors. Websites can be created and maintained by an individual, a group, a business, or an organization and used for various purposes.

All the websites combined form the world wide web, known as the World Wide Web or WWW.

Websites come in a seemingly endless variety, including educational, news, pornographic, e-commerce websites, and more.

The web page content is usually a mix of text with other media. So there are no rules that dictate the structure of a web page on the internet.

The first website was created in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist. 3 years later, in 1993, CERN announced that anyone could access the world wide web for free.

Initially, websites were categorized by their areas of function:

Websites of government agencies = .gov

Websites of educational institutions = .edu

Websites of non-profit organizations = .org

Commercial websites = .com

Information websites = .info

Although these domain add-ons still exist, they say little about the current contents of web pages on the Internet. In modern-day internet, the “.com” add-on is the most popular domain. Followed by add-ons denoting countries, such as: .it, .de, .co.uk, .fr, etc..

A website is undeniably beneficial for your business. Except serving your business’s image, it helps raise brand awareness and loyalty, consequently sales as well. It collects all your marketing projects into one destination. You can also make use of a virtual worker working for you 24/7.

The website should be the destination of your audience. The end of the funnel, like a virtual office. All the marketing you do online (advertising, content, even videos, and podcasts) should guide your audience to your website.

Advantages of the Website

Online real estate

The website is set up for anyone to find upon searching it, and this way, meet their needs. If you do SEO properly, your website can rank high in search engines like Google and reach even billions of people.

Custom made

You can create a website from scratch. Unlike social media, here you can decide what to serve others. You can also include software within the site for various tasks you would want to get done on a daily.

Disadvantages of the Website

Again, this is not a typo… The disadvantages of the website also come from its advantages:

Online real estate

SEO is constantly changing. If you make mistakes, you risk getting ranked lower in search engines, and as a result, lose sales. You need to learn SEO skills or hire a professional. Although you would be spending money, this is most likely a blessing in disguise. Hiring an SEO professional could be the decision with the biggest ROI you ever made.

Custom made

Yes, you can create your own custom-made website, but do you know how to? Once again, the lack of skills and training presents a problem here too. You can have all the freedom possible, but simply not know design or possess any technical skills to develop the website you desire. In this case, you either spend quite some money and effort in developing your skills, or… can you guess it?!

-Hire a professional!

What’s it gonna be?

Websites or social media? What’s best for your business?

The answer is you have to use both. A combination of the two has proven to give the best results for businesses of all areas.

Social media strategies are great for generating leads. It is through the website, however, that you channel those leads down the marketing funnel. This way, you have complete control over your brand and your audience’s experience.

Think of social media as a way to reach out and meet your potential prospects. Whereas, your website, as different events where you provide them with the information they need or you want to give out. And where they can also buy your products and services.

If you use both these communication tools properly, you will attract and engage with your audience through social networks and sell using your website.