Last Updated on March 7, 2021 by Filip Poutintsev
Which is better for your company or personal brand? A website or a bunch of social media accounts.
It’s no question that you should have both, but in case you have limited time or budget and want to focus on only one, which one you should select? This article will tell you the pros and cons of each solution, analyzed from different perspectives.
Table of Contents
Comparison
Easiness of use
Social Media
It’s extremely easy and fast to open and manage social media accounts. This is the only true benefit of social media, which makes it so popular.
Website
Building and managing a website requires some IT skills. However, you can also hire people to do this for you.
Promotion
Social Media
It’s very hard to get followers on social media. Even if you post interesting content, the majority will still not follow you simply because they don’t know who you are. Promotion methods are on social media are very limited, and social media marketing itself is expensive and non-effective.
Website
It’s also hard to promote a new website at the beginning, but at least you won’t have to ask for the consent of every person who stumbles upon your website. With SEO, content plays a bigger role, and you can rank well even if no one knows you. It’s still going to be hard and time-consuming, but at least normal people besides celebrities will have a chance at getting traffic.
Expenses
Social Media
Most expenses come from producing content and marketing your account; therefore, social media is not cheap.
Website
It’s very cheap to create your own website. Most expenses will come from promoting it and doing SEO.
Safety
Social Media
Today social media companies suspend accounts in bulk. In order to get banned, hate speech is no longer required like a few years ago. Today it’s enough just to have a different opinion than the publicly accepted one. When your account gets banned, you will get no explanation and no chance for appeal. No one is safe from this madness. If they can suspend an account of a sitting US President, then they surely will not care about doing the same to you.
Website
Hosting accounts and domains can also get suspended, but it’s very rare and, at least for now, not done for political motives. The reason for website suspension is usually spam and rarely some illegal activity.
Freedom
Social Media
On social media, possibilities are limited, and you always have to worry about the big brother. For example paying other users to promote your account is not allowed on many platforms.
Website
You can do anything you want on your website; the possibilities are endless. For as long as you don’t break any laws, you have nothing to worry about.
Your legal rights
Social Media
On social media, you do not own your account nor your followers. On most social media platforms, you are not even allowed to sell your account; if something, this is proof that you have absolutely no rights when it comes to the ownership of your account.
Website
You own your website and all traffic it receives fully. If you decide to collect data from your customers, it will also belong to you.
Financial motives of the platform
Social Media
Social media platform makes money from you and from your followers. Their goal is to keep all of you on their website as long as possible and intervene in your activity so that they can maximize their profit. Also, since they own your followers, they are no afraid that you will leave to the competitor site.
Website
You pay the service provider only for the domain and hosting. They don’t make any profit from your activity; therefore, it’s irrelevant to them, and they will not try to intervene in what you do.
Conclusion
Social media is a good fit for you if you simply want to keep a personal text or photo diary for yourself and your friends and follow other interesting people. However, if you have a business in mind, investing n social media account can be very risky since you can lose it all one day.
