Partner Article

Facebook Page vs Website: How to Maintain an Active Online Presence

If you are like most small business owners, chances are that you’ve grappled with the social media versus website question. In fact, you might already have asked yourself why you need a website when you can just create a Facebook pages to maintain an active online presence. Benefits of Social Media Social media provide a number of benefits – the chief of which revolves around the ability to setup a business page, the millions of people already using these platforms, and the ease of use. Here are some benefits you stand to gain with a Facebook page:

1. Technical Expertise For starters, you need very little to no technical expertise to use Facebook pages and other social media platforms. The ease of use means that you just need to get started, get the hang of things, and get moving.
2. Optimization The large number of pages, the great volumes of content shared on social media, and the growing popularity of these platforms means that your Facebook business page will already be optimized for search engines. As such, it will show up whenever someone searches for your website.
3. Marketing and Integration
4. With most social media websites – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and the like – you will get excellent marketing capabilities. For instance, you can use them to raise money, build a mailing list, sell your products, and do so much more.

You will even be able to track the activity of users on the Facebook page, see the kind of content they like, and check how many people you have reached using your content. In the grand scheme of things, you will understand what works best and what simply doesn’t.

Benefits of Websites

However, a website offers some benefits that you don’t stand to gain with Facebook pages – or with any other social media platform for that matter. For starters, you will be in control of your website. A website might prove expensive to start, run, and maintain. However, all of this extra cost will be made up for once you learn how easy it is to tweak and control what goes on the website, what is displayed, and what your audience can do on it. Done well and professionally, your website will end up costing more than if you simply set up a couple of free pages on different social media platforms. However, this is not where the differences stop. Following below are some of the considerations you must make with regards to having a professional company website:

• Domain and Web Hosting

First, you need to pay on the regular for your domain name and website hosting. Thankfully, with domain registrars and hosting providers like Godaddy and Hostgator, you can register your domain for about $15/year and host your site for $1/month. You can learn how you can save on Godaddy and Hostgator this and this page.

• Technical Expertise, Development, and Design

If you don’t know how to design and develop a website, you will need to hire an expert to do it for you.

• Search Engine Optimization One of the ways to attract more people to your website would be to optimize it for search engines. This means having to hire someone to help you out.

Over and above everything else, it might be a better idea to invest your money and time in getting something that is unique and your own—website—instead of going the mainstream way - Facebook pages. However, the best idea would be to use both of these tools to bolster your online presence.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by ShiShir Del Rio .