What’s more important, social media impressions or website traffic?

The Common Question: What’s more important, social media impressions or website traffic? The direct and simple answer? 

The Real Question: Reach or Revenue?

The best and most impactful story-telling should be on platforms that you own, control and can monetize.

More About Revenue

Through the golden-age of social media, the one area of business that it has failed to fully disrupt is e-commerce. Social media is a funnel.Your website is still far and away the best store for your athletic department.

Fortune 500 Example: Look at the two biggest retailers in the world, Amazon and Walmart. Their websites have become even more important to their core business through the ‘golden age of social media’ and perhaps even more revealing, they don’t spend time trying to convert sales on social media.

Your department should use social media to direct fans to owned platforms through retargeting, paid social campaigns and tracked links.

But Social is Built For Story-Telling, Right?

If engagement through story-telling is your ultimate goal for impressions, you don’t have to go very far through a news feed (in any form) to understand the prime of social media storytelling has passed. 

Social is a fast, quick, rapidly changing content presentation. Storytelling is nuanced. It requires organization and chronology, which is nearly impossible on social media.

Whether it's concerns about the social media algorithms, privacy, first-party data or attention span of the audience on those platforms, there is no greater time to take control of the storytelling power of your website than right now. Social will always be good for short, quick visuals and even better as a funnel, but the best and most impactful story-telling should be on platforms that you own, control and can monetize.

A Specific Example: On a recruiting weekend, your team’s schedule every minute of the weekend around a timeline to convince student-athletes to join their program. Basically, they are telling the story of the program over a 48-hour window. 

Then on social media, they post incredible content that is delivered at the whims of the algorithm or the distracted world of direct messages.

A strategic approach to telling your recruiting story, in a complete, chronological and orderly fashion can be done relatively easily on WMT websites. It’s evergreen, dynamic and most importantly, always organized to impress the recruits and their families.