There are tons of businesses out there whose entire web presence consists only of social media locations like Facebook. You know the kind I’m talking about: food trucks, service providers, repairs shops. For businesses like this, a meager social media presence can actually work quite well. For one, it tells people all of the necessary information: where you are, when you’re open, how to contact you. It’s also supplemented with things like Yelp, which (if you’re doing your job right) are providing free advertisement for you when people are searching for businesses like yours.
But sooner or later, it seems that the best businesses upgrade their social media presences to a real website. Often WordPress is the foundation for this, as it is affordable, well known, and powerful. But what are the criterion by which a business decides it’s time for a real website? We’ll take a look at these below.
1. You Want to Appear More Professional
Though social media is perfectly adequate to provide a basic level of communication with your customer or user base, current and future, it doesn’t exactly reek of professionalism. Real businesses have real websites, and if you want to be perceived as such, it might be important to start investing in a real website. Companies like Norskelån can help you figure out how to pay for it, but it needn’t be expensive. As stated above, many WordPress sites can be built for little money, even (and especially) if you’re doing it yourself.
2. You Have Complicated Things to Convey
Let’s face it, Facebook can only communicate a bare-bones amount of info to your interested customers. If you provide a specific kind of service, or you have a product to describe in detail, a social media presence isn’t going to do the trick. Social media can be a great place for customers to find out about you, but if you want to deepen the relationship, have a website where they can learn more.
3. You Want to Extend Your Brand
Facebook pages are fine, but your brand is existing within someone else’s. Aspects of Facebook’s brand will rub off on yours, and it will be impossible to establish the elements which create a thoughtful, lasting brand. So you need a website to do these things. A website can have all the colors and images and functionality you want. Your social media profiles cannot. You should definitely have both, but if branding is important to you, don’t be caught with just one or the other.
There are a million reasons to have a website for your business, but most of them have something to do with one of these three points. Growing businesses almost always need a real website sooner or later. And because these websites are so easily created these days, and because it’s not hard to make them work well and look good, there’s no reason not to go ahead and do it. So make yourself a website. You’ll be glad you did, and it might make a big difference for your business.