I’ve had a couple of conversations with clients in the past few weeks that started with, “Do I even need a website? I’ve just been doing Facebook.” and ends with my standard speech I’ve titled
“Social Media Should Point People To Your Website, Not The Other Way Around.”
Please allow me to explain in an outline of three.
Part 1 – Eventually, that social media website is going to go away.
Social Media is great for distributing your message, but eventually that platform is going to go away. I know, I’m crazy. However, take a look at the online communities that have come and gone, or at least come and faded into painful obscurity – Yahoo, Friendster, MySpace, AltaVista, FourSquare, Flickr, Google+, Plurk, Brightkite – The list goes on and on…. Some are more obscure than others, but many were big players in the game. When those spaces are gone, how will people find you *if* they even remember to look for you?
Part 2 – Social media sites want you to pay.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all make money from paid posts. The push at Facebook now is to make business pages less visible and posts from actual friends more visible because they figured out that we don’t really go to Facebook to be marketed to, we go to see pics of our friend’s kids and grandkids, where they went on vacation, and how they got that gnarly black eye over the weekend. With that organic reach being limited, of course they’ll gladly let you pay a bit to up your visibility.
This also reminds me of the overall rule of life for those of us using social media.Remember, if something is free then that probably means that you’re the product.
Part 3 – The endgame is to get people to your website. That’s where we make the sale.
See how I worked an Avengers reference in there? Search engine trickery!
Well, not really.
Your website is where you make the sale. It’s where you’ve got your blog, shopping cart, products, and contact info. It shows everything you do in a nice, easy to parse structure (if you did it right) and the content is under your control. When the current big social media site is gone, you’ll easily still have everything you’ve worked on and created to promote on the next platform. It’s there, no memberships needed, for all the web to find.
So, the game plan is this:
- Create a blog post with interesting content and publish it.
- Post a link to the blog post on your social media page with a nice brief teaser image and a bit of text.
- Add share buttons to your website to make it easy for others to point their friends to your site as well.
It’s really easy. Ok, well, maybe there’s a bit of work in there creating the content and doing it on a regular basis. I get it. I struggle with that too, but the effort is worth it. I’m not saying never make a Instagram post, but find a way to take it and drive people to your site. The goal is a sale and that’s usually done on our website or in our real world store.
Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash