Why have a website over social media?

Many businesses get on social media because everyone is there, and so are their ideal customers and potential collaborators. In some cases, some businesses get on social media just because they’ve heard that’s what they need to do. It’s become a default for anyone starting a project or business, to create an account on a social media platform (Instagram in my case). And of course it’s become so default, it’s easy to set up, convenient to post, and relatively fast to get your first followers. But these reasons are also what make it difficult to be in these apps.

When using social media as the main or only channel to get out there as a business, you trade this "ease" for feeling overwhelmed and discouraged. When it comes to using a website instead of social media, or at least, prioritizing your website and making it your main and most important online space, what you get is flexibility, control and ownership.

Let's go over each of them.

Flexibility

With your own website, you get to choose the structure of your online space, which means you can design the experience you want to create for your website's visitors. You don’t live in a flat profile, but in a space you can build however you want.

A website also allows for more and different content topics than socials do. In social media, everyone seems to be an expert at one thing and that's all they post about. And of course, many business websites do that, too. But if you want, in your website, you can expand to other topics that maybe aren’t directly related to your “niche”.

For example, as a web designer, when I prioritized my presence on Instagram, I felt the pressure to only post about web design, because I didn’t want to confuse the little followers I had. But on my website — my space — I don’t have that pressure, people can choose to explore what they’re most interested it, and I won’t be punished by an algorithm.

Similarly, a website allows for a bigger range of formats. While Instagram only allowed image and video (and rewarded video more), on my website, I can post in text, images, videos, GIFs, audio, and of course, web design as a medium. And I can choose how long, short, big or small everything is.

Control

When you have your own website, you get to have control over everything that goes on in it and how it's shown. Or, put differently, nothing else controls your website. Not algorithms, not feeds or timelines, not distracting ads, no likes or other surface-level metrics. This is great for many reasons, but most importantly, this means that your website’s content doesn’t have an expiration date (or at least, you get to choose if and when something “expires”).

Social media makes everything fast, which also means your posts get old fast, too. A website is evergreen. Every new piece of material on your website becomes part of a body of work, or an interconnected garden, that can last for years. Things you might have created one, two, five or ten years ago can be seen and relevant forever.

Ownership

If having your own website is like having your own house, social media is like living in a hotel room. In a hotel room, you might have more people around and services that make your life easier, but you’ll never live fully comfortably and you will never own the space.

Sure, you don’t really own your website, unless you hand code it and publish it through your own server. But when I say ownership, I mean that this space is yours and you can do with it what you want. And ideally, also be able to bring it elsewhere. Be able to export your website’s content and bring it to a new hosting, like you’d do with furniture when moving to a new home.

If you live in a hotel room, the hotel you live in might just close one day. I know it’s very difficult to imagine, but, in the same way, maybe Instagram will cease to exist one day, or at the very least, people will stop using it, just how Tumblr died back then, or Twitter got bought by a certain someone and kinda died, too.

And even if that hotel doesn’t close, they might close their pool, or change their services, or change their breakfast schedules, forcing you to adapt over and over.

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I think it's important that we put more care and nurture into our websites, but that doesn't mean social media can't be a useful tool. What's important, if deciding to use social media, is using it to bring people to your website, instead of having your business live in your socials.

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While this post speaks specifically about businesses, having a website can also be a better option for people who use social media for their personal life or creative work, and for the same reasons! In the future, I might write about how to go about choosing a website over social media for reasons other than business, but in the meantime, if you're interested in that, you might like: Websites for just you and your loved ones.