The emergence of social web is continuously enhancing the focus of most of the companies on social media tools, which increase the online presence enormously and create significant opportunities for engagement with current or potential customers. But the question here is does the rise of social media diminish the number of visits to the company website or further, is social media is making company websites irrelevant? Or, are the companies loosing focus on their websites while extremely concentrating on social media? And finally, what is the right balance between website and social media for companies?

‘Facebook growth leads to decline for many company websites?’ is a very interesting article which puts emphasis on this “social media vs. company website” issue. The article is posted on Smart Insights by Dave Chaffey who is a bestselling author, consultant and speaker who enjoys sharing tips, tools and techniques on all things digital. He decided to write this article down after he had a look into a research data from Webtrends and Adgregate called ‘The Effect of Social Networks and the Mobile Web on Website Traffic and the Inevitable Rise of Facebook Commerce’ and he was also curious about whether the companies are allocating the right level of resources between website management and Facebook.

These are the 4 remarkable points he mentioned in this article supported by graphs:

1) Visits to the majority of corporate websites are in decline.

2) Growth in Facebook (and other social presences) occurs at the expense of corporate sites.

3) For some brands Facebook dominates.

4) Retail and transactional sites are different.

The recent data about yearly change in unique visits to Fortune 100 sites shows that visits are declining for the most of the companies, while they are growing for the minority. Is the growing social media reason for this? Let’s have a look at the second point. Most of the companies facing decline in the number of their website visitors, experience an increase on the number of Facebook visitors. Of course, Facebook is not the only responsible of the decreasing website visits. Other online platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn are also effective in this decline. In my opinion, the most appealing analysis in this article is that it is a totally different scenario for e-commerce companies. In this case both forms of presence are increasing. Last but not least, for some companies such as Coca-Cola and Walt Disney website visits might be even negligible comparing to Facebook visits which is most probably related to the highly strong brand equities.

Dave Chaffey believes that this is a useful benchmarking analysis to perform for any company sector, and I cannot agree more. Obviously, the right balance between website and social media for companies depends on the industry, the customer base and the company itself. One of the most critical issue here is the companies should not forget that their websites are still important for their business, even if it is losing the priority. Both corporate websites and social media are strategic keys for success and companies should find out the right balance for themselves and allocate their resources appropriately. In addition, companies should be aware of the potential risks of social media presence, but this can be a topic for the next post.