Marketing Strategy - Social Networks or Website?

Last Friday, a discussion started on the Mauritius Internet Users about some company, organization or even goods retailers in Mauritius using their domains to redirect users to their Facebook page. I believe this situation may exist elsewhere as well not only in Mauritius. One of the MIU members found this situation annoying while another found that this approach is rather unprofessional. What’s really the issue in using a domain which then redirects to a Facebook fan page and what aspect of it can we define as unprofessional? Which is a better approach to customers social profiles or a website?

Using Social Media platforms

Using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can be very beneficial means for delivering information to targeted audience about new products and services. The primary reasons are because: it is cheaper, it allows you to stay in touch with your customers/clients anytime. Thus, making it a much more seamless communication between the parties involved and it eliminates the costs required for maintaining a website, renewal of domain name etc. What can you benefit from registering a domain name and then redirect it to a Facebook page? Not much except that it may improve your search presence in search engines but still that depends. It may be that those how do it intend to do something with the domain name later. May be they still need to figure out why should they have a website, what to put in it (even though that may seem obvious) and how should it be designed. In the meanwhile, they buy a domain name to protect their brand and then use it to redirect customers to their social profile. I guess that’s a fair hypothesis. But buying a domain name for the sole purpose of redirecting customers is not a very cost effective approach.

Can we think of it as unprofessional? No, not for the fact that they actually use a domain name to redirect users to their social profile but yes for the fact that those organization rely only on those platforms as means of providing product details and other information such as price to potential customers.

Social profiles v/s Websites

A website is a great tool for marketing and advertising products. Since websites are search engines’ preys, it can help you reach a wider audience. Furthermore, websites are available 24/24 hours and 7/7 days of the time. So customers can check out about your latest arrivals, new services and promotional offers at anytime. In contrast, companies that rely solely on social platforms cannot always respond to customers’ requests and this can frustrate them since they have to wait for you to get back on-line to obtain a respond. Speculate the following: one of your potential client urgently needs to know whether you have a particular product or not. She immediately head up to your website and grab all the information she needs. On the other hand, imagine that you are relying only on social profiles, the client makes a request and seeing that you do not respond in a particular amount of time she may go and get what she needs from another supplier. Terrible fate but that’s the inconvenience.

Conclusions

Social networks and websites are great tools to market and advertise products as well as services. However, websites and social profiles are completely different. Therefore, it is advisable to use a combination of both strategies which will certainly help you grow your business by reaching a much wider audience as well as increasing the reliability of the information you provide on-line. Through the means of social networks show them what you have to offer, get their attention then redirect them to your website and blow their mind.

Regards,

Cédric