It’s 2022. Social media is everywhere. Do you still need a website? Is it not possible run your entire business with just an instagram profile or a Facebook page? Or what about having an app instead?
In this blog, I’ll give you the Smart & Slick take on this question as of 2022.
Do you need a website? It depends. But more than likely, yes. Here’s why.
Despite a proliferation of social media platforms, your website remains the only piece of digital real estate you have full and complete control over. Social media networks can change their rules whenever they want and control what you can and cannot do on their network. This very important distinction between your own website and any other type of digital property available. This impacts a bunch of other aspects of your business including branding, SEO and even potentially your funnel and business model.
SEO, short for search engine optimisation, is the process of making a webpage that Google (and other search engines) will like, and therefore rank prominently in their search results. There are two distinct sides to SEO – on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation.
On-page optimisation involves putting certain bits of code in certain places on the page, in certain tags, in such a way that Google’s algorithm will understand what the web page is about and therefore rank it for relevant search terms. If you use a social media platform – or for that matter, even a platform that allows you to build a website – you will probably have limited control over what code you can put where. You will always have an SEO advantage if you have full control over the coding of your pages.
To a lesser extent, off-page optimisation is also impacted. Because, do you really want to build links to a web page that you do not really own? It’s not something we’d want to do or ever recommend. What if Elon Musk does buy Twitter and decides to make changes to the platform? There’s probably going to be little you can do about it.
Again, it boils down to the same thing – when it’s your website, you have complete creative control over the content, and therefore the website design. So you can brand it any way you want. A social media platform will give you limited branding power, but the overall profile has to look like part of Facebook or Instagram or Twitter.
A good business model is all about ownership. Do you own your customer list? On a social media platform, the answer is ‘not really’. The social media platforms are very careful to make sure that they give you some marketing power, but you still need them in order to contact the customers they help you find.
With your own website, you can have your own bespoke marketing funnel and database, and thus you own your customer list. That makes your business much more secure.
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