Website or facebook page: what to choose to reach your audience?
The internet gives companies an abundance of options when it comes to promoting their products online. Numerous social media platforms where hundreds of millions users are at business’s disposal can be an easy choice for beginning entrepreneurs. However, they are not always the only or appropriate option.
Social media, Facebook, in particular, gives companies a lot of opportunities to reach their potential customers and promote their products or services. With the business's fanpage, the company can post original content for free and the platform’s algorithm will spread it across users’ news feeds. Website, on the other hand, have a little bit different purpose. Although, site, as well as social media, allows for content publishing it acts as a business card where the company can fit a lot more information than on a piece of paper.
As of 2018 Facebook states that there are 80 million small and medium business pages. It shows that social media still play an important role in the company’s presence online. Because social media are constantly introducing changes to keep their users endlessly scrolling they seem like the perfect place to introduce the company to its potential customers. Besides that, paid ads on Facebook allow reaching a much larger number of users that are potentially interested in the product or service the company is offering.
Unfortunately, the coin has two sides - platforms won’t be eager to show the content from the fanpage that doesn’t have much traffic. If existing followers are not active it will be hard for the company to acquire new ones. So it can be difficult at first to build a solid following.
Poor organic reach
Over the last couple of years, organic reach on Facebook declined drastically. In 2017 companies noticed the 20% drop in reach and 34% following year after Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that the platform will limit the reach of branded content to make the user experience better. Nonetheless, Facebook still is the number one choice when it comes to social media for business.
Website
The truth is the website requires much more work. Social media already have IT support teams behind them so the company doesn’t need to worry about creating a graphic design or functionalities from scratch. All it needs to do is to set up a business page and publish engaging content. Although Facebook has a lot of advantages, at the end of the day, the company doesn’t have much control over what and in what form it can share on the platform. Besides that, social media can ban the fanpage altogether resulting in a loss of all the created content.
The website is the company’s own medium, created and shaped with the specific vision and purpose. All the content published there is curated by the site’s owner and can be changed at any moment if needed. That allows for the creation of something unique that will draw users’ attention and get them familiar with the company’s proposition. On Facebook, all fanpages look the same and the company can stand out only by its content.
The website helps the company to stand out from the crowd and gives users the place to come for interesting and useful information while Facebook serves as an intermediary between the company and its users. While social media help to create a business’s image online, potential clients sooner or later will end up on a website.
Necessary maintenance
Although, the website is a perfect way to present the information about the company it requires regular updates and checkouts. The company has to hire a team of professionals or outsource the maintenance of the site to make sure that it works correctly and the users don’t have any issues with it.
Which one to choose?
The answer is actually both. There are a lot of small companies that only exist within the pages of Facebook without the intention of creating a website. By not having a website they are missing the opportunity to introduce their business to the broader audience. Because what if their potential customers don’t have a Facebook account? In today’s world it is probably unlikely but still can happen. Being present on a social media platform and in the search engine results with own website gives more odds in favor of the company to be discovered by their target audience.
