For many businesses, social media marketing would seem like an ideal option compared to a website, both in terms of cost and administration. In support of this, recent reports from Facebook indicate that there are more than forty million small business pages, which shows a massive acceptance of the platform in business marketing. As a marketer, you can’t help but wonder if this is the direction of future business marketing. As a business owner, the growth of the social media platform leaves you questioning whether you really need a website, and this comes courtesy of sophisticated platforms like Facebook that make reaching customers easier, more reliable, and cheaper. . The need to make your site obsolete may even be too tempting, especially when you compare the ease of building customer relationships between the two platforms. However, the shortcomings that using Facebook marketing brings only outweigh the benefits in the long run. To better illustrate this, here are reasons why choosing a business website over Facebook is a smart move.
A website allows you to control your brand while, in contrast, a Facebook page limits the ability to personalize and package your brand according to the interests of your customers. Although the page allows an organization to upload a background photo that can be the brand’s logo, it is still limited based on information about the business. A user may not access valuable information directly from a Facebook business page compared to a website that offers a helpful information hub.
In addition, a website can be optimized by including phrases and words that potential customers are likely to use in search engines, this is a factor that must be taken into account, since appearing in search engines is a critical factor in the marketing a business.
The rates of competition on social networks also determine which companies use the platform for marketing. A typical Facebook user increases the number of friends and pages they like by a considerable percentage each year. What this means is that the content displayed in the user’s newsfeed continues to grow while the time they have to view all of that information probably remains constant. Therefore, these users will have to not engage with some posts and consequently this becomes a competitive arena for businesses where each must fight to ensure their posts remain relevant. Considering that different clients have different needs, it becomes almost impossible to remain relevant to all clients using a similar post. On the other hand, a website gives an organization the full attention of the user, while the information it uses covers a wider scope and thus can accommodate different users at the same time.
In general, managing business marketing through Facebook will become increasingly difficult due to the gradual increase in competition. Whereas with a website, competition steadily decreases over time as a business learns to manage keyword search term competition. Once this hurdle is overcome, the company becomes more established unlike Facebook where the race to gain stability is endless and therefore makes the platform less desirable.
