Don’t Choose: Leverage Both Websites and Social Media

If you have to choose between a website and social media, always opt for a website. Is this really true?

Updated: February 04, 2025

Marketing experts have long told small businesses: If you have to choose between a website and social media, always opt for a website. But the narrative of only running a website has led to a false choice for many companies. In today’s market, it’s as important to create new demand in a product or service as it is to capture the interest that already exists. Let’s unpack that!

IN A NUTSHELL
While a website is a necessary part of professional marketing, on its own, it’s not a sufficient investment for a small business to grow in the future. To efficiently drive website traffic and shape your brand online, you should also consider social media, forums, and web communities.

Website vs. Social Media—a False Choice?

Watch me lay out the full text about why choosing between a website and social media is indeed a false choice

Every small business owner has likely pondered the decision: Running your own business website vs. a social media account. On the one hand, you could invest in maintaining a Facebook page to promote new discounts, answer customers’ questions, and engage people around your brand. It sounds appealing—everyone you know has a Facebook account, it’s easy to publish a few posts during weekday evenings, and it’s free!

On the flip side, what serious business doesn’t have a website today?! A website is a professional business card, a potential online shop, and a place you fully controlbut it comes at a cost. So what gives? Marketing gurus and business publications will tell you that you only need a website, and their arguments may seem compelling at first:

  • You control your own website, but you cannot fully control your social media account.
  • When your potential customers search in Google, they typically see websites among the results and not social media pages.
  • You can collect more data about your visitors and customers using a website.
  • You can create a sales funnel to drive leads through a website.

Guess what—none of these arguments are false or misleading, they still hold water! But while a website in practice is a must-have for any small business to make full use of the possibilities online, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a sufficient strategy on its own to ensure long-term business growth. Put simply, a website is great to have, but it shouldn’t be the only marketing investment you make. Keep on reading to learn 4 key reasons why this is the case.

Webiste vs. social media. The key statistics.
Click to download infographic

Sources:
[1] nic.icu
[2] prioridata.com
[3] zippia.com
[4] statista.com
[5] vanilla.higherlogic.com
[6] adobe.com

1. Creating Brand Demand is as Important as Capturing It

A website only creates business value if someone discovers and interacts with it. This leads us to ask the question: How would a potential visitor discover your website? This is where the false dichotomy of website vs. social media already starts to break down.

In marketing, we often talk about demand capture and demand generation. In short, this means that you either engage in activities that generate interest in a brand, product, or service (demand generation), or that you try to capture attention from interest that’s already out there (demand capture). A great example of how to think about this is the infamous Coca-Cola Christmas Truck campaign.

From Bulgaria to Australia, Coca-Cola visits various cities during the Christmas season to hand out free Coca-Cola. At the same time, the company runs several big ad campaigns to reinforce the brand message, such as the “Real Magic at Christmas” video ad. If you were to think about these two marketing activities in terms of how Coca-Cola is approaching marketing, you could categorize them like this:

  • Demand generation: Coca-Cola runs video ads with a message of connecting its product to the Christmas season. Example: When the holiday’s approaching and you’re at the supermarket to make food purchases, you suddenly come across a shelf with Coca-Cola. This reminds you of drinks for Christmas and so you grab a pack of Coca-Cola on your way to the cashier. Coca-Cola created a need, an urge, or a desire in you to go out and buy their drink.
  • Demand capture: The Coca-Cola truck rolls into your local town to hand out free drinks. You show up with your family, as as not to miss out on free stuff during one of the year’s busiest commercial seasons. A lot of people stand in line to receive their free soft drinks. Coca-Cola simply acts on that existing interest and urge. (Arguably, you might say, Coca-Cola both creates and captures product interest with this move—fair enough!)

The point of this dichotomy is that every company who wants to grow and make more sales ultimately needs to invest in both generating interest in their brand, product, or service as well as simply catering to any existing market interest. A website typically captures existing demand, for instance by acquiring visitors via Google Search or from one of your newsletters. But that assumes you already sit on a contact list or that someone is googling a keyword that relates to your business, i.e., they’re already engaged and interested.

What about all those potential customers out there who haven’t yet heard of your brand or may not even be aware of your product or service? This is where a social media account can come in handy, allowing you to reach completely new audiences by posting about who you are and what you sell and to engage those new audiences both organically as well as using paid ads.

That’s right—a business social media account and a business website should work in synergy with each other, each feeding the another with new traffic. Cut off the demand generation part and you may see your website traffic and brand engagement stagnate over time as the market and the world around you change.

2. SEO Has Become (Much) Harder

When most people think of driving traffic to a website, they think of search engine optimization (SEO) or the activity of creating web content and promoting that content to acquire organic (“free”) search traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. While this is still one of the best, long-term marketing channels for traffic acquisition, it’s gotten significantly harder in recent years. Like, really hard.

The competition in Google Search varies with industry and topic, but the general trend is similar across all markets. Here’s what’s changed:

I’m not saying that “SEO is dead”—it most certainly isn’t—but it’s simply not as easy to acquire organic search traffic as it used to be. This means that you can no longer rely solely on a website and the potential search traffic it might acquire over time; you need a second growth channel to grow your business.

3. New User Behavior Online Resulting in Website Traffic Loss

We already mentioned that TikTok has become “the new search engine” that’s used alongside Google, or worse yet, sometimes outright replacing traditional search. This isn’t an isolated phenomenon. More fragmented behavior online means that businesses need to be present in more than one marketing channel in order to continue to drive growth.

Besides TikTok, we’ve witnessed another major change in where people spend their time, which especially impacts Google Search: the rise of forums and communities. Much has already been written on the topic, so let’s just mention that both Reddit and Quora have absolutely exploded in traffic, particularly from Google Search itself.

It turns out that while Google spent years trying to promote content that conformed to its infamous “E-A-T” model (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), they’d forgotten one of the most important components of how people value and act on information: word of mouth, or the value of peer recommendations. This is why Google revised its model and added an ‘E’ to its “E-A-T,” representing Experience. People don’t only care about who’s a trusted expert on a given topic, they also value human experience and social commentary on those topics. Just think about how you’d typically go about selecting a family doctor.

What does all of this mean for you as a small business owner? If you want to acquire traffic and build your brand online, you increasingly need to engage in forums and communities in order to monitor your brand and respond to comments about the products or services you sell. Think of it like being present on Yelp, but with a forum attached to it. The goal is not primarily to sell or promote yourself, but to listen, learn, and offer value in the context of discussions relevant to your business.

Community marketing is on the rise, and while it’s not a direct sales channels for now, it’s already changed the type of content that’s visible in Google Search and has the potential to change the way businesses build their brands in the future.

4. User Engagement Still Key to Brand Power

If we were to consider all the previous points so far, they all seem to point in one direction: Businesses need to spend more time listening to, learning from, and engaging directly with their audience. Creating compelling, useful content online to drive organic search traffic and building email lists are still very valid, powerful marketing activities—but they can’t be your only tactic.

A website is key to creating a brand presence and leading traffic to a place that you control, shape, and make the most out of. But the hard work of building brand awareness online increasingly happens through activities that engage with your audience. Social media is still one of the key places where user engagement takes place, ranging from Facebook and X to Instagram and TikTok.

But it goes further than that: These same social media channels increasingly restrict our ability to send traffic back to our business websites. Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn are just some of the channels guilty of this (ever noticed how people nowadays put links in comments and not in the social media post itself?). While this is typically used as an argument against having a social media account for your business, the truth is that this is part of the larger trend I’ve been describing in this post: Online marketing used to be mostly about driving traffic back to a website and attributing that traffic to different marketing channels. Today it’s increasingly about driving engagement, and adapting the business to audience trends and needs, without necessarily always resulting in website visits.

Simply put, not just “SEO traffic,” but all traffic, is becoming harder these days. You either try to swim against the tide or you adapt as a business and make the most of the emerging opportunities we see today in forums like Reddit or social apps like TikTok.

Make Synergy More Than a Fancy Word

I hope by now I’ve managed to convince you that you need both a website and a social media account for your business to thrive in 2025 and beyond. While a lot of points relate to the fact that it’s gotten more difficult to drive website traffic (only) via traditional channels like organic search, the larger point is rather one of synergy.

Your website is the online home of your business, but for people to discover it, you need to put effort into establishing roads and signs leading back to it. Here are a couple of concrete tactics to create that mutually beneficial relationship between your website and your social accounts:

  1. Social proof: Whenever you receive positive commentary about your business on social media, ask about reusing it as testimonial on your website.
  2. Social contests: Consider running special discount campaigns or social contests on social media that involve visiting your website or becoming a newsletter subscriber.
  3. Influencer collaboration: Partner with influencers in your industry or business to drive engagement on social media and traffic to your website—especially powerful for local businesses where costs for this are typically low or even zero but returns can be great.
  4. Behind-the-scenes content: This has become a powerful content type in the age of social and community marketing. Record video or take pictures that capture the daily operations or efforts put into your products or services. Post visual content on social media to create engagement and interest, and publish full-length blog posts on your website to share the full context or story.
  5. Live streaming: Another hot medium. Host a live QA session using a platform like YouTube or LinkedIn to offer your industry expertise and highlight new product/service launches or tutorials. This typically works best when you put your brand and sales hat aside, focusing on the lifestyle and true value coming from the industry or business field you’re involved in.

In any and all of these scenarios, you have a chance to either directly or indirectly drive traffic back to your website in order to transform engagement into leads or sales opportunities. This, in turn, then raises the question:

Is Setting Up My Own Website Difficult?

The answer to your question boils down to three constraints:

TIME

KNOWLEDGE

BUDGET

I don’t have time, I don’t know anything about this.”
“I don’t have a website yet, but the amount of technical stuff to deal with is too much for me.”
“I’m afraid that if I invest in a website, I won’t know how to handle it and I’ll burn my budget.”
“I’m on social media, why do I need a website?” (I hope I’ve already managed to dispel this myth!)

All of these concerns are entirely reasonable. However, while the technology for website building has become increasingly complex, the actual process of creating your own site has become much easier. In fact, there is a simple and intuitive alternative that allows you to quickly and easily create a professional website, especially for people without specialized technical knowledge.

That option is called a website builder. Other options include creating a so-called WordPress website or to use a web agency to create a custom website—while suitable for some companies with a greater need for customization, most small businesses will get most bang for their buck with a reliable and trustworthy website builder.

Read more: 6 key questions to ask when building a website: DIY vs. agency

A website builder offers an intuitive interface and ready-made templates that you can easily customize. It makes the process of creating a website faster, simpler, and more accessible, even for beginners. Here at cyber_Folks, we offer our intuitive, AI-powered website builder _now, with which you can set up a full-fledged website in just 60 seconds. Give it a try for free!

Conclusion

Finally, we’ve established that in today’s world, a small business has to engage in marketing in multiple channels using multiple tactics if it’s to sustain growth over time. Maybe that was the answer you assumed to be true all along. So what about the pros and cons of running a website vs. managing a social media account? Here are some key differences that are worth keeping in mind as you plan your future marketing activities:

WebsiteSocial Media
(+) Instant start(+) Instant start
(+) It is all yours; you are not subject to secret algorithms and corporate regulations, as is the case with social media(+) Free maintenance
(+) It’s easy to present detailed information about your services and direct customers to it(+) People in the US spend +2 hours a day on social media
(+) Independence, you present the offer the way you want(+) Instant interactions (likes, comments)
(+) You decide which user opinions are visible on your website(-) Limited influence on the appearance and presentation of content
(+) Dispel customers’ doubts using frequently answered questions (FAQ)(-) Low organic reach, visibility given mainly to fresh content
(-) It’s becoming harder to get traffic(-) Inconvenient handling of customer inquiries
(-) Maintenance costs(-) Risk of sudden account blocking, profile hacking, and theft
(-) Primarily captures existing market demand, doesn’t generate it(-) Increase in spam and scams is becoming a problem

So there you have it—both of these channels complement each other, and integrating them into your larger marketing mix will bring much better results than relying solely on one of them. What’s your next move to grow your brand presence and drive more traffic online?

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Alexander Rehnborg

Head of Marketing – _now

Language and culture equally captivate me, particularly as they intersect within the realm of marketing. With over a decade of experience in search marketing and more than six years leading international marketing teams, I frequently find myself returning to fundamental questions about what motivates people and what defines valuable marketing.

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