Today, with so many different social media sites out there, people are asking themselves if they actually need a website at all. Does your company need a destination to which people can travel and find more information or is it enough to simply be visible in social media. Can companies successfully move all of their efforts to social media and not have to worry about an actual site?
In some cases, the answer to that is yes, you can so long as your social media presence allows you to do all of the things that you should be doing on your site. If you can interact well with your customers on social media, then its a workable solution. The problem arises in the fact that many if not most social media sites are not even remotely secure so far as hiding email addresses or other things from the public as a whole and most customers today want that. They’ve had enough of having their business up and out there for the world to see and they want their information protected and the business that they are doing protected from prying eyes. That is difficult to do on sites such as Facebook whose privacy policy recently changed again to be less private.
Making sure that you can interact with your customers in a way that allows them to order from you, to ask questions about your products and even to download questions and answers is imperative. That isn’t always possible on a social media site. In addition, giving them the kind of privacy that they want in your communications and allowing them to download or to upload things for you to review is also not possible.
In many cases social media interaction may be all that is required but if you have to exchange a lot of ideas or offer files to each other, if you want communication that cannot be read by others or isn’t the property of another company, the chances are good that a website on a private hosting is the right answer for you.
