As a Business, Should I create content on my Website or on Social Media?
Introduction
As a business owner in the digital age, having an online presence is critical for reaching customers and growing your business.
A key part of that online presence is creating quality content that educates and engages your target audience. But with so many options across your own website, blogs, and social media platforms, it can be overwhelming to decide where to focus your content creation efforts.
In this post, we’ll analyze the pros and cons of creating content on your own website versus social media. We’ll look at factors like control, reach, engagement, and more. By the end, you’ll have a better understanding of where you should be spending your valuable time and resources when it comes to content creation.
Content Creation Factors to Consider
Before deciding where to create content, let’s first outline some key factors you should consider:
Control Over Branding and Messaging
Having full control over the look, feel, tone, and messaging of your content is often easiest on your own website. With your own blog or site, you decide what topics to cover, what tone of voice to use, etc. On social media, you still have control over your voice, but may be more constrained by the platform’s policies or algorithms.
Reach and Discovery
Social media offers access to vast, existing audiences you may not have yet reached. But quality content on your site, optimized for search, can also drive new visitors organically over time.
Engagement and Interaction
Social platforms are designed to facilitate engagement and conversation around content. It can be easier to spark dialogue and connect with audiences directly on social media.
SEO Value
Content on your owned platforms can play a bigger role in improving your search engine rankings if optimized properly. Social content is harder to fully optimize for SEO.
Conversion Opportunities
Your website offers more direct opportunities to convert visitors into leads and customers. Social platforms drive engagement and awareness, but make it easier for visitors to leave without converting.
Owned Website Content Creation
Creating quality, optimized content right on your own website or blog has some major advantages:
Full Creative Control
Having a company blog or other owned media channels gives you complete control over the tone, voice, topics, and visuals used in your content. You don’t have to worry about a platform changing its policies or algorithms and impacting how you create content.
Brand Consistency
Publishing content on your owned platforms makes it easier to ensure brand consistency across posts. This builds credibility and trust with visitors over time.
Higher Search Visibility
Optimized, high-quality content on your site has more longevity and ability to rank in search engines over time. This leads to sustainable organic traffic growth.
More Conversion Opportunities
Since visitors are already on your site, it’s much easier to guide them toward a conversion goal, whether that’s a purchase, signup, or downloading educational content. There are fewer clicks and redirects in their path to conversion.
However, focusing solely on owned site content also has some potential challenges:
Reaching New Audiences
It can be difficult to expose your content to new audiences that haven’t already found your website organically or intentionally. So it limits the discovery of your brand and content.
Lower Engagement Rates
Unless you already have a strong, engaged visitor base, it’s often harder to spark conversation and connections around content published solely on your own site or blog.
More Resource Intensive
Creating truly unique, high-quality, optimized content requires significant time, skill, and resources. Not all businesses can sustain owned content creation as a sole strategy.
Social Media Content Creation
Creating and publishing content directly to social media platforms also comes with many compelling benefits:
Grow Your Audience
The massive existing user bases on popular platforms offer the ability to get your content and brand seen by large, relevant audiences that you may not reach otherwise.
Spark Engagement
Features like commenting, tagging, and sharing make it easy for audiences to connect with your content on social media. They allow you to build relationships with your target market.
Stay Top of Mind
With content feeds that are constantly updating, publishing actively on social media allows you to appear frequently in front of your followers to reinforce awareness.
Monitor Conversations
Seeing conversations and mentions of your brand occurring publicly on social platforms allows you to participate, connect with followers, and monitor sentiment.
However, focusing too narrowly on social media content does involve some downsides to consider as well:
Limited SEO Value
Content published directly to social media carries less SEO value compared to optimized website content. It won’t drive sustainable organic search traffic back to your own site.
Temporary Content
Social media feeds move extremely fast, so the shelf life of an individual post tends to be quite temporary. It’s often here today, buried tomorrow.
Decreased Control
You must follow platform guidelines when publishing content, limiting what you can produce. Algorithms or policy shifts may impact reach at any time.
Key Takeaways and Next Steps
Ultimately, most brands benefit greatly from utilizing a blended owned plus social media content approach. But rather than spreading your efforts randomly across sites, it pays to be strategic based on your brand strengths, audience, goals, and capacity.
Here are some final recommendations when mapping your content creation plans:
- Audit your existing owned content – identify gaps where site content can be created to align with search demand and conversion goals.
- Assess social media platforms – determine 1-3 platforms where your audiences are highly active to focus initial efforts.
- Develop recurring formats – maintain efficiency by creating some evergreen post series’ or segments that are reusable across platforms.
- Enhance top-performing content – take highly engaging social posts and adapt them into fully optimized website content assets.
- Create original content on your website and then repurpose the content into different formats for social media
Creating compelling content takes significant time and effort. But by taking a targeted approach on the right owned and social media channels for your business, will drive tangible results with greater return on investment.
Use this post’s framework to determine what blend of owned website and social media content makes the most strategic sense to fuel your goals and growth.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
