A couple of months back I was chatting up with a friend about his business and in the process he said something interesting. “I am suggesting a few of them to not have a website and instead just use a Facebook page,” he said. Reminded me of another time when I was helping a friend’s friend (a musician) launch his website and someone suggested the same thing, “dude, use Facebook Twitter and stuff..why a website?”
Now the latter was sort of influenced by what international artists do, the ones who use only Myspace and Tumblr to connect. However, the former coming from someone who runs a design agency wasn’t just frivolous talking. When you come to think of it, it is not such a drastic thought, social media can give you plenty of options to have a powerful online presence without investing heavily into web design and development.
Imagine an event management company. They organize the best shows, concerts or parties in town. In all probability they won’t be a big group with nationwide reach. Under such a situation the only tools that they really need might be a Flickr account, a Facebook fan page and perhaps a Twitter ID. Put the best snaps of a concert you had on Flickr, tag them, give a link to your Facebook fan page (now with your fancy company name branded URL) and then tweet about it with hashtags of the artist and location. Have a blogspot blog linking all of them together for some search traffic. To my mind you are done.
In fact if are an NGO or a charity and you need a website to generate awareness about a certain issue or propagate a certain agenda that drives your work, a Facebook fan page for the issue is all you need. Drive in volunteers, get people aware, host albums of your work and tag visitors and you are pretty much done with everything except maybe online donations. For which you can easily associate with a site like Giveindia or Giveworld.Also read other ways people can get in touch with your charity through social media.
Now all this need not be restricted to Facebook, we don’t mean to make it another Tradeindia.com. With YouTube now letting you embed external links and prior to that letting you have video annotations you can have your own website in the biggest video sharing site by just linking to individual videos. Don’t take my word for it, see it in action. Check BooneOakley’s YouTube channel website for instance.
Then again if you are a celebrity you perhaps don’t need anything more than Twitter and Twitpic actually, unless you are Aamir Khan who needs to articulate to perfection.
There you go, who needs a website now, if all of this is possible for close to nothing on social media?
Alright, before you jump to the conclusion that I have gone delusional and justify who would actually need websites, consider that this post is more a solution for cash strapped and limited reach businesses/profiles. Not quite a startup solution, but if you are a one or two person team trying to get things up and running, these are wonderful avenues to not only have a good web presence but also showcase your best abilities in the creative ways you use them.
Manish – I had the exact same conversation with my friend who wanted an opinion on setting up a website. Apart from all the reasons that you mention, my point was that he needs to go to where his customers are (facebook/twitter/others), rather than have them come to him (the website). Of course for a larger organization, the website becomes the necessity, but for smaller ones, the visibility on the other sites has higher returns than the website.
i do believe that website and social media must go along together. For a big company it not easy to do that, for individual person it might be can be done, also a new company.
For meanwhile i think we must do both, in the future perhaps
I believe having a own website is must with a blog and yes of course social media as well.
After newspaper now websites are dead too? Looks like this is a never ending vicious cycle.
I like the thought of flitterbook (facebook-flickr-twitter) – replacing the traditional websites. It is not without its merrit.
It is easy to reach someone on a facebook or a twitter. With the website one has to through the grind of setting up, search engine optimization and then just wait for the traffic and leads.
I also agree with Gerard of website and social media going together. The only difference would be dont’ spend as much time on the website. The ratio could be 70% social media and 30% website.
i have been following you guys for a long while and yet after every short while i keep seeing these kind of amateurish posts from you all inspired by US internet scenario. If you can get a website built properly seoed and then propagate it thru social media you can use that website to sell stuff and make moolah rather than just spending time on social media to promote and then hoping people will go offline and buy that stuff that kind of stuff works only for a big brands not for small time guys especially in India .
@Abhishek J
Read the post. Thanks.