When enterprises do online marketing, they often find themselves choosing between an official website and short videos. In fact, the two serve different functions; understanding them as substitutes for each other often leads to a misallocation of resources.
Different positioning: one is the headquarters, the other is the front desk
An official website carries the most complete and most stable information about a company: its business scope, qualifications, case studies, and contact details. Its value lies in being usable over the long term, unaffected by changes in platform rules; it can be understood as a company's fixed external interface.
Short videos, by contrast, sit at the front end of reach: through personalized or scenario-based content, they actively approach users and are responsible for capturing attention and creating a first impression. They are flexible and highly efficient at spreading, but their content has a short life cycle and is heavily influenced by platform rules.
Differences across four dimensions
Content form. An official website suits structured, systematic explanations and can carry parameters, qualifications, long-form articles, and documents, but its expressive power is limited; short videos excel at conveying emotions and selling points within a dozen seconds, with a low cognitive threshold, but they struggle to carry complex information.
Traffic source. An official website relies on search and direct visits — it "waits for people to come," with high intent but slow growth; short videos rely on algorithmic recommendation — they "go find people," covering ground quickly but with weak stability.
Trust building. Trust in an official website comes from verifiable information — the entity's qualifications, registration, and contact details — built slowly but more solidly; trust in short videos comes from a sense of authenticity and personalized expression, built quickly but easily affected by the comment environment and individual factors.
Conversion method. An official website suits processes that require comparison and decision-making, with a path that can be designed and tracked; short videos suit scenarios with simple decisions, with a short path and strong explosive power, but user retention is difficult.
How they work together
A more stable approach is to define clear division of labor: short videos take on reach and sparking interest, giving a clear information pointer within the content; the official website takes on reception and confirmation, guiding users to specific pages and completing the explanation with full information; afterward, long-term maintenance is carried out through channels that allow sustained contact.
The key is not to measure the two with the same metric. Demanding a conversion rate from short videos, or demanding impressions from an official website, will both lead to the wrong conclusions.