You are busy. You have an active community on a social media network like Facebook and your time is limited. It is easy to Tweet or to post a photo to your Facebook page, but your website has not been updated for so long that you have forgotten how to edit it.
Is it even worth having a website now, when your audience is always on social media? Are websites still relevant?
Some key points to think about before abandoning your website for a social media site:
Durability: Will the social media site stick around?
Remember MySpace? Friendster? Did you ever use Xanga? or Digg? Some of these sites are still around, others are long gone.
See R.I.P. – Top 10 Failed Social Media Sites or the Wikipedia List of defunct social networking websites for lists of dead social media sites.
Reachability: Will your audience see your message?
With social media sites, there is a “firehose” of constant messages and so it is easy for your content to get lost in the rapid stream of updates. Even if you are posting at opportune times, you won’t reach everybody you hope to.
Feedback and analytics (available for most social media sites) can give you a good idea of how well your content is doing.
Findability: How easy is it to find your online presence?
Try a Google search for your brand’s online presence. How many of the results point to your content on social media?
Next, try to find your content using the search feature of a social media channel.
A previous post from this blog appears on the first page of Google results for a search of the title of the post (“what does it cost to make a website and get online”).
This article has been shared on our Facebook page several times (most recently 2 October via Buffer).
And yet, it does not appear in Facebook’s search results:
Usability: How easy is it to update your website?
Perhaps the reason your website is out of date is that you don’t have an easy method to keep it up to date. We recommend using a Content Management System like WordPress or TYPO3 that is customised for your situation. Talk to us about how we can help simplify your content