If your business already has an active Facebook page, Instagram account or TikTok profile, you might wonder whether you really need a website as well.
Customers can already see your work, follow your updates and send you a message. So what does a website add?
The important thing is that a website and social media are not supposed to replace each other. They do different jobs, and for most businesses they work much better together.
Think of Your Website as the Centre of Your Online Presence
Someone might discover your business on Instagram. Someone else could click a Facebook advert. Another person might see a TikTok video, while somebody else simply searches for your company on Google.
Your website gives all of those people one central place to go.
Instead of asking a potential customer to scroll through months of social media posts to find your services, menu, prices or contact details, you can organise everything properly.
A visitor can quickly understand who you are, what you offer and what they should do next.
That could be making a call, requesting a quote, booking a table or arranging an appointment.
Social Media Content Moves Quickly
One of the strengths of social media is that there is always something new.
It can also be one of its weaknesses.
A useful post from three months ago can quickly disappear underneath dozens of newer photographs, videos and updates.
Important business information should not be difficult to find.
Your website gives permanent information a permanent home. Your services stay easy to find. Your menu can always be in the same place. Your best work can be presented as a proper portfolio rather than disappearing down a feed.
Social media is great for showing people what is happening.
Your website is better at explaining the business as a whole.
Your Website Can Make Social Media Advertising More Useful
This is where having both starts to become particularly useful.
Imagine somebody sees your Facebook or Instagram advert and visits your website.
They look around, show an interest in a particular service, but leave without contacting you.
With the appropriate advertising technology and consent in place, that website activity can potentially become part of your future advertising strategy.
Meta, TikTok and Google all provide tools that allow businesses to measure certain actions on their websites and create advertising audiences.
This is commonly known as retargeting or remarketing.
For example, somebody might visit a restaurant's private dining page without making a booking. A builder might have visitors looking at kitchen renovations. A salon might have people viewing a particular treatment.
Those visitors have already shown some interest.
Retargeting can give the business another opportunity to reach some of them later, rather than continually advertising only to people who have never heard of the company.
So the website is not simply an online brochure. It can become part of your wider social media marketing and advertising strategy.
Give Your Advertising Somewhere Useful to Go
A website also gives your advertising a much better destination.
If a restaurant is promoting private dining, it does not have to send everybody to its general Facebook page.
It can send them directly to a private dining page showing photographs, menus, reviews and an enquiry button.
If a builder is advertising bathroom renovations, the advert can lead directly to a page showing bathroom projects and explaining that particular service.
The person clicks an advert about something they are interested in and immediately finds more information about exactly the same thing.
That is a much smoother journey.
You Have More Control Over Your Own Website
Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are valuable platforms, but the platforms themselves belong to other companies.
They decide how profiles appear, how their algorithms work and which features businesses can use.
Your own website gives you much more control over your branding, content and the way a potential customer moves through your business information.
It can also provide reassurance when somebody searches for your company after seeing an advert, receiving an email or speaking with you on the phone.
A professional website gives them an official place to check who you are and learn more about what you do.
Website or Social Media?
For most established businesses, it should not really be a choice.
Social media helps people discover and engage with your business.
Your website gives them somewhere to research the business properly and take the next step.
Social media can send visitors to your website. Your website can support your advertising and retargeting. Your website can link people back to your social channels.
They are different parts of the same online presence.
If you already have a strong social media presence and are wondering how a website could fit alongside it, we are always happy to talk it through without making it complicated. You can reach Blue Lion Websites in the UK on 07863784600 or 07863767936. If you are calling from outside the UK, use +447863784600 or +447863767936.
A good online presence is rarely about choosing one platform and ignoring everything else. The strongest approach is usually to let each part do the job it is best at and make them work together.
