I’m beginning to realize that for some businesses, websites are becoming less and less relevant. I have lost clients who’ve basically put all their focus on their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, and created enough referral momentum that they’re able to get new clients through their social media connections alone.
That said, I personally consider this a foolish and risky way to do business. For one, social media companies can arbitrarily suspend you, ban you, or just shut down your account because you write the wrong thing. People can report you for posts you made years and years ago. It’s also far more likely that a social media account will end up getting hacked than a website, and it’s more likely your personal data (login info, email, etc) will end up in a data breach (which seems to happen to Facebook with disturbing regularity these days.)
Everything you upload to a site like Facebook essentially becomes their property (whether they admit it or not.) And search engines like Google do not index or rank social media pages the way they index and rank website pages. For example, you cannot submit a “sitemap” to Google’s Search Console for your Instagram or Facebook page, nor can you (at least to my knowledge) utilize Google Analytics on sites like Facebook (although I believe Facebook is now offering it’s own version of analytics for its business pages.) Lastly, a business website with proper SEO will always outrank a Facebook page for the same business.
But what I have come to realize is that businesses can’t afford to only build a website and ignore social media, so I’ve begun to offer social media management as an additional service. I will set up clent’s Google My Business pages (basically mandatory at this point), and sometimes their Facebook pages. I really don’t get involved in Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn, but I have a feeling that as time goes on, Social Media companies are going to keep expanding their features for businesses to get those lucrative advertising dollars, and we’re going to find ourselves increasingly competing to convince business clients to create dedicated websites, as opposed to them establishing their online presence solely through social media companies.
I suppose the thing to stress to them is that with a website, THEY are the owners, and they can post whatever they want. There are no rules they have to abide by, or risks that they’ll get banned from their own website.
Either way, I see things getting more challenging for us as website developers as the internet continues to evolve. I have this nagging feeling that someday, 15, maybe 20 years from now, personal websites are going to become obsolete.
