Make your website your online home, not Facebook

This post was swritten in 2013, when many businesses were moving entirely to Facebook. This advice has proven even more prescient with Facebook's algorithm changes, declining organic reach and the rise of platform risk awareness. Updated 2025.

Craig McGill makes a good case for social media strategists not putting all their digital eggs in the Facebook basket at the Contently Managed website. His In Social Media strategy, should you put all your digital eggs in the Facebook basket?  wisely warns that Facebook could go the way of sites like Friends Reunited, MySpace and Bebo.

McGill says old-fashioned websites should stay the mainstay of any strategy — because that’s where people buy things and learn more information.

He writes:

While many a brand can try to hard and go OTT on platforms, most now accept that it’s prudent (if the audience is there) to blog and be on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and perhaps the likes of Vimeo, LinkedIn and so on if relevant. But they all do it in combination with website and mailing lists, ensuring that they can capture a good chunk of their audience on multiple platforms (miss the blog post? You might not miss the tweet and if you do there might be an email along shortly anyway – all with different content).

Again, most of the platforms mentioned above may fade away – new ones will come along, others will merge – but websites are seen as the mainstay. SEO efforts are seen as spending the majority of time on directing traffic to websites as that’s where people will buy items, learn more information and so on.

I realise that this does almost sound like “No one ever got fired for having a website” circa the old IBM argument doesn’t it? Am I just being old fashioned?

The original Craig McGill post is archived, but this advice stands.

Websites don't have to be expensive to maintain, you can get a free site on a service like WordPress although it would be worth stumping up money each month for a decent host and a managed package. This site is hosted on Ghost Pro which is a fine alternative.

More importantly, get your own domain name and make sure you own that space online.

Recent events in social and online media only serve to underline the point: Twitter's decline after Elon Musk's takeover, TikTok's uncertain future, Instagram's constantly changing algorithms and LinkedIn's feed manipulation all reinforce why owning your domain and website is essential.