Is social media edging out the need for websites?

17 August 2010  |   We spotted this great article on Advertising Age recently where the author raises the question of whether, with the advent of Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages and other social media platforms, companies still actually need websites for their brands. His answer is a resounding yes: primarily because websites anchor your brand and often create its first online impression – and they tend to rank highest in keyword searches.

The key is to make your website a hub for all the other channels that your brand’s being promoted and discussed on. Don’t ignore them – embrace them. Having your site collate all this activity makes it easy for your customers to engage with your brand via the platforms they prefer.

Keeping an eye on all the channels is one thing but disseminating your content across them is another. A publishing platform that lets you send out cross-media messages will make your life simpler – tweet your blog posts or cross-publish to Facebook at the click of a button.

Collating social media content into your website has secondary benefits for you too. It makes it much easier to monitor your online reputation and respond to any areas of concern very quickly. And it opens up huge opportunities for tracking customer behaviour across various channels and platforms. You can get valuable data on what they’re interested in and what they’re doing – right now. With a little clever eCRM, you can translate this into targeted, effective marketing.