These days, it has become quite easy for a business to establish an effective online presence. There are a number of platforms like GoDaddy, SquareSpace and Wix that give an excellent web building and hosting services. They provide you the best all-in-one solutions, whether you want a beautiful website, hosting, domain name, eCommerce, great templates, analytics and 24/7 support.
Additionally, you can create a Google Business Page, LinkedIn profile, or Facebook page to promote your online business. It is important to figure out what’s best to accomplish your business goals. Most companies find it necessary to have both social media profile or Page and a great functional website to create an effective brand. But it always pays to understand the specific role of using a website and social media for your online brand or business. So, let’s take a glance at what’s best for your business:
Business website vs Social media profile or Page.
Business Website
The biggest advantage of creating a beautiful and proper functional website for your business is that you own it. This clearly means that you can control your brand and its online presence. You also get to decide the content you want to publish on your site. And of course, you can repurpose it to earn maximum revenue. Check out the Website Designing Process in the details below:
Although social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook works great to establish to promote your business online. But it certainly limits your control on the things you want to do. For example, you need to follow certain rules when it comes to posting content. Also, you should know the number of times you can post and how many users/followers you want to check your updates. When it comes to business websites you can keep it as simple as a one-page flyer. Or, you can give it a sophisticated look like a sales portal and multimedia marketing hub.
Advantages of Having a Website
Improves business credibility – According to a recent 2019 survey, more than 80% consumers believe that companies with websites are highly honourable. If you own website, it will definitely legitimizes your business and improve its credibility.
Affordable – These days you can find a number of cost effective options to create a high quality website. It all depends on your business size, requirements and budgets. According to it you can browse a plenty of packages that can go further with your business success flow. You can always make necessary changes and improvements later. Check out below video to find out how much does a website cost.
Helpful for better marketing – When you get your business online you can easily communicate with a huge group of people. This helps you to create a large customer base and increase revenue. By having your own online platform you can add more useful features for promoting your business. It includes blogs, videos, customer feedback section, and other enticing promotional offers.
Get full control – Having a website gives you the freedom to control what you put on it. You can include a plenty of attractive features to make your site more useful for the visitors. You can start with free templates or affordable web designing company. It will make you personalise your site to make your online business stand out of the competition.
Overhead expense reduction – When you have a solid online presence you can easily spread a word about your brand. These days most customers like to access information online when it comes to knowing about any brand or company. It will reduce the overall cost of operating your business including paid social media marketing.
Available 24/7 – With an effective website you can provide your incredible services 24 hours and 7 days in a week. So most customers can connect with your brand from around the world without struggling with different timezones.
Disadvantages
Work hard to attract traffic – You have to put more efforts to bring a large network of visitors on your site. Not only this you might have to build and implement effective marketing strategy to generate leads.
Highly complicated – If you want to personalize your website with sophisticated designs and functionality. You will need to invest more money and time for developing it. This can be highly challenging if you try to do it yourself.
Regular maintenance – No matter whether you own a small or well-established business. It is important to keep it up-to-date with all the vital information. For this you will need to put sufficient effort and time.
Social Media Profile or Page
Whether a business is small or well-established, they can easily set up a social media profile is really helpful. You don’t have to struggle for longer hours. Just create your account on any popular social site and your business profile will be active in a few minutes. You can also direct your domain name to your social media platform. This technique is known as domain forwarding and it can help you reach out to a large consumer base quickly.
Additionally, you can create a business-branded web address. This is a much better way to connect with your audience instead of requesting them to follow you on Facebook. In fact, you will get a built-in base without putting in much effort. As these days most people like to create accounts on twitter, Google Business, LinkedIn, Facebook, and many other social media platforms. You just have to create a profile and you can monetize the popularity of visitors who were already using the platform.
Advantages
Easy and low-commitment way – Once you start using a social media platform to promote your business/brand. You don’t have to stick to it for a long time, particularly if you are not getting any results. You can switch to another platform at anytime after deleting your existing account.
Brand Promotion – Most of people prefer to shop from brand pages they follow on social websites. By viewing the profile of a company on a social network customers are able to learn about it’s purpose and value. This helps them to develop loyalty towards their brand. They also come to know about your mission and how you respond to their queries or doubts.
Free and quick – It is really easy and cost-free to create your social media account. However, to promote your social accounts further, you might have to setup the paid schemes to get more visitors to your page.
Customer engagement – With a popular social media profile you can get the attention of a number of buyers. This encourages businesses to facilitate interaction and create relationships.
Attract customers globally – Most businesses redirect the visitors on their site to their social media profile. This helps them to get an increased revenue every year.
Disadvantages
Open Forum – when you have a social media site, the customers can easily interact with you, but all the messages get filtered through the third party platform. This means they can ask questions and raise the number of customer complaints and feedback. This doesn’t give you the complete control on your site. You cannot decide who will put comment on your site. You can only request your past clients to leave comments on your social pages.
Lower design variations – Using social media for your business promotion will give you a disadvantage of limited designs. This clearly means you will have to follow a given layout without making any changes. Though you can adjust the profile picture and header.
No ownership – When you create a social media platform for your business you have to go with their terms and conditions. This means you cannot present any content and promotions given in their conditions. Even if you have to do a contest, you will need to comply with their rules. If you are only using a social media profile for your business then you must consider to build a website. Just think about what will you do if the service provider close the social website or suspend your page?
Low variety of reporting tools – Most social websites offer a limited variety of reporting tools and other necessary features. So you can only access the information they want to share with you.
Conclusion
Ideally, every business should have both website and social media presence. First, make sure to create a unique website for your company or brand needs. It will be much easier to do with a professional web developer. After you have built an effective site you should focus on creating profiles on a popular social media page. Then you can link to the content on your site with social media pages to gain your followers attention.
