During an age where social media presence has become much more popular, more accessible, and vital to the visibility of business and organizations, it may be tempting to use social media exclusively as the tool of choice to run your business. However, it’s still very important to have a dedicated website to supplement your social media presence. We’ll be going over some reasons why you should still invest in running your own domain for your business.
Credibility of your Business
A dedicated website can help with establishing the credibility of your business. Having a social media account alone doesn’t provide much proof that your business is legitimate or reliable. Furthermore, it’s much more likely that a website that incorporates keywords optimized for search engines will be discovered in searches compared to a social media page that’s often competing with keywords utilized by other profiles on the same platform. Your audience may end up clicking on a profile that is completely unrelated to your own. This makes it incredibly difficult for your business to be discovered in the sea of social media pages. It’s much more useful to use a website as a home base, and then have social media pages be used as a means to extend your reach to different audiences.
Analyzing Your Traffic
It’s helpful to be informed about various analytics regarding user engagement with you business. This includes various data such as how many people are searching for your business, the amount of user interaction that links pertaining to your business gets, where the user engagement is coming from, and the trends in frequency of engagement. While many popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram include some form of this data, the tools and details are limited and may not be specific enough to help you adjust your approach to presenting your business for maximum engagement. In comparison, you can access much more powerful and customizable data analysis tools for your own website to aid you in improving traffic to your business.
Maximum Customization
Have you ever wanted to have customized newsletters sent out routinely to your audience? Perhaps even personalized emails for special occasions? Or maybe a dedicated blog that provides updates and personal stories related to your business or organization?
All of these features are possible with a website. From customizing the visual layout to incorporating various tools such as portfolios and e-commerce plugins, there’s an endless amount of flexibility that is often not achievable on social media platforms. You can even incorporate social media tools on your website to provide a central hub of information, such as embedding a Twitter feed or a gallery of images from your Instagram page.
One final thing to add is that if a social media platform goes down or becomes obsolete, so does your presence and connection to the audience on that platform. Having your own domain can protect you from this reliance on another platform. And while there are some costs of setup and routine maintenance that comes with running a website, you can argue that the overall benefits far outweigh what can be a small cost.