Websites are dead! Business blogging is dead! Everyone is switching over to social media! Stop. Right. Now. These are the headlines of many recent articles and blog posts by writers in the social sphere.
As a business owner, all these headlines may have left your head spinning. And rightly so. It is maddening. How to make sense of it. Websites aren’t dead. Blogging isn’t dead. Nor should everyone just use social media as the only way to communicate with their customer and other communities.
Think of it this way. The website is your house. You own this space and you can do what you please there. Your blog is a room in that house… say the kitchen because that’s where a lot of activity happens. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest are paths that lead people to your house. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the major path to your front door and if you keep your path maintained to your house, which by the way you are always keeping your house fresh and updated, people are more likely to show up at your doorstep and come in. Social media are smaller paths which can be blocked or changed by outside forces leading to your house so they shouldn’t be depended on completely for access.
In order to communicate with your communities, you will need different channels to reach them with their unique needs. It has to feed into your business goals.
So basically nothing dies. It is like Dr. Who, it just regenerates into something different and new. It all comes down to the channels have to make sense for both your business and your customer community.
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Ann Marie van den Hurk, APR, is an accredited public relations professional with over a decade experience bridging the gap between traditional public relations and emerging technologies. Need help reaching your business’s customers, call 302.563.992 to schedule an initial consultation, or contact Mind The Gap Public Relations.
