Social media spokes lead to the center of the wheel - your website

It’s staggering to me how many entrepreneurial creative professionals don’t own and operate their own website.  Many simply use one of the various free social media platforms as if it were their website.

Here’s why it’s important to control your own web presence.  Yes, most social media platforms are free, but most domain and hosting packages to own your own site won’t even cost you $100 a year, and if you use a platform like WordPress as your Content Management System (CMS) to make updates to your site and publish those updates yourself, you gain a lot of control over your site.

Not that this will happen, but what will you do if Facebook ever goes away?  All of the work you’ve put into that social media platform would be gone.  If you own your own website that’s not the case.

Plus, for a decent digital marketing strategy to work well, you really want to drive your web traffic to one spot that you can control and capture email addresses to build your marketing.  Think of your website as the center of a bicycle wheel.  All of the spokes of the wheel are social media platforms, yet all of those spokes lead back to the center of the wheel, where the most strength and control are.  That’s how your digital marketing works – your website is the center of the wheel, where you have the most brand strength and control.  However, the social media platforms do play a large part in helping drive traffic from the outer points of the wheel to the center.

Part of the idea is to get your ideal customers to pay attention to you and your messages, and you can control that online environment for your customers easier from your own website, whereas on a social media site a user can be easily distracted by friends of friends that take their attention away from what you’re saying and trying to engage with them on, resulting in them leaving your social media page for another.

Social media is important, but use it as a way to initiate and continually participate in conversations, but learn to drive interested traffic to your website to really build a relationship with your customers.

Posted by: Nick Ventuerlla