Social Media or a Website: What Small Businesses Really Need
Most new business owners start with social media. It’s free, everyone’s already there, and setting up a Facebook or Instagram page takes ten minutes. So it’s a reasonable question: if the page is doing the job, why bother with a website at all?
The honest answer is that this was never really an either/or. Social media and a website do two different jobs, and the businesses that do well online tend to use both — with a clear idea of which one is doing what.
The one difference that matters: rented vs owned
Everything else in this article follows from a single distinction.
Your Facebook page, your Instagram account, your TikTok — you don’t own any of them. You’re a tenant on someone else’s platform. The landlord decides how many of your followers see a given post, what the page looks like, which features exist next year, and whether your account stays up. Pages do get restricted or suspended by mistake, and the appeal process is whatever the platform says it is.
Your website is different. You own the domain, you own the content, and nobody can change the layout or throttle who sees it. That’s not a small distinction when you’re building something you’d like to still have in five years.
The practical version of that advice: build your audience on social, but send them somewhere you own.
What each one is genuinely good at
Social media is very good at things a website simply can’t do:
- Showing the work as it happens. A before-and-after photo, a job finished that morning, a short video of the workshop. This is where trades, salons, cafés and makers have a real advantage.
- Being remembered. Someone who follows you sees your name occasionally without searching for it. That’s how you get the call six months later when they finally need you.
- Local word of mouth at speed. A share in a village Facebook group can genuinely fill a diary. Nothing on your website works quite like that.
- Conversation. People ask questions in DMs and comments that they’d never fill in a form for.
A website is good at a different set of things:
- Being found by people who don’t know you exist. Someone typing “electrician in Tonbridge” into Google is ready to buy. They aren’t scrolling Instagram hoping to bump into an electrician.
- Answering the boring, decisive questions. Do you cover my area? Roughly what does it cost? Are you insured? Are you taking new customers? These decide whether you get the call.
- Looking established. A tidy website with clear services and prices reads as a real business. A Facebook page last posted to in 2024 reads as one that might have closed.
- Staying put. A post is gone in a day. A page keeps working for years.
| Social media | Website | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to start | Free | Varies — we’ve broken the UK costs down here |
| Who owns it | The platform | You |
| Reaches people searching for your service | Rarely | ✅ This is its main job |
| Reaches people not looking for you yet | ✅ Its main job | Rarely |
| Effort to maintain | Ongoing — posts, replies, comments | Low once it’s built |
| Shows your full services and prices | Awkwardly | ✅ Properly |
| Lifespan of what you publish | Hours to days | Years |
Look down that table and the pattern is obvious: the gaps line up. Each one is strongest exactly where the other is weakest.
Where most small businesses actually go wrong
It’s rarely “chose the wrong one”. It’s usually one of these:
Treating the Facebook page as the website. It ends up carrying the price list, opening hours, service area and contact details — all buried in old posts, none of it findable by anyone who isn’t already on the page. Customers who search for you on Google find nothing solid, and Google itself has very little to rank.
Posting into a vacuum. Committing to daily posts before there’s anywhere for interested people to land. Someone sees your work, likes it, taps your profile — and there’s no link, no prices, no next step. You’ve spent the attention and banked nothing.
Being on five platforms badly. One platform you actually keep up with beats four dormant accounts. Dormant profiles don’t just fail to help, they actively suggest you’ve stopped trading.
Forgetting the one profile that isn’t optional. For a local business, the Google Business Profile matters more than any social account — it’s what puts you on the map for “near me” searches. If yours isn’t set up, start there, and read our comparison of the profile and a website for how the two work together.
How to make them work as a pair
Think of it as a loop rather than a choice.
- Pick one social platform — where your customers actually are, not where you enjoy scrolling. For most UK local trades and services that’s Facebook; for anything visual it may be Instagram.
- Post the work, not the marketing. Finished jobs, the team, the van, the new stock. It takes a minute on a phone and it beats anything more polished.
- Put the website in the bio, and in the post. Every profile should link to your site. That’s the whole point of the loop.
- Let the website do the closing. Services, areas covered, honest price guidance, a contact form. Here’s what to put on it.
- Ask happy customers for a Google review, not a Facebook like. Reviews are the thing that most influences whether a stranger picks you — how to ask without being awkward.
Social brings people in. The site turns them into enquiries. Google reviews reassure the ones who are checking you out.
So which comes first?
If you’re starting from nothing: Google Business Profile, then website, then social. The first two capture people who are already looking for what you sell, which is the fastest route to actual paid work. Social is how you stay in people’s minds afterwards — powerful, but slower, and it only pays off if there’s somewhere for that attention to go.
Cost is usually what puts the website last, and that’s a fair objection — a small business site from a UK agency typically runs somewhere in the £300–£1,500 range, depending on the studio and where you are in the country. Here’s where we declare our interest: it’s the reason we build websites free for new UK businesses, straight from the Google Business Profile you’ve already filled in, with a free .co.uk domain and hosting the only thing you pay for. If that’s what’s been holding you back, here’s why we do it.
You don’t have to choose. Just be clear which job you’re asking each one to do — and make sure the one you own is the one everything else points at.