Plenty of good businesses run entirely on a Facebook page, and I am not going to pretend that is madness. It is free, people are already there, and posting is easy. If that is where you are, you are not doing anything wrong.
But there are three specific things a social page cannot do, and they matter more as you grow.
1. You are building on rented land
You do not own the page. You do not own the followers. The rules on what gets shown, and to how many of them, change without warning and never in your favour. Accounts get suspended by automated systems with no useful appeal.
None of that is likely on any given day. All of it is survivable if it happens and you also have a website. It is not survivable if the page is the whole business.
2. People searching for you may not find you
Someone who already knows your name will find your page. Someone searching for what you do, in the place you do it, usually will not — search engines index websites far more thoroughly than they index social pages, and your posts are not structured in a way Google can make much sense of.
That is the difference between customers who already know you and customers who do not. The second group is where growth comes from.
3. Your information is buried
Your prices, your opening hours, your service area and your best work are all in there somewhere — scattered across two years of posts in reverse order. Nobody scrolls that far. A website puts the answer to every common question on one page, which is also the thing that stops your phone ringing with the same three questions.
What social media is genuinely better at
I would not tell you to drop it. Social does two things a website cannot:
- It shows you are active and real, right now — a feed from last week beats any amount of polished copy
- It reaches people who were not looking for you, through shares and recommendations
Social media is how people find out you exist. A website is how they decide whether to trust you with money.
They do different jobs. The businesses that do best run both, and point each at the other — the website carries the detail, the social carries the personality, and both link across.
The realistic first step
You do not need a big site to start. A single well-built page with what you do, who for, what it costs, your best photos and one obvious way to get in touch will do more work than most eight-page sites. You can grow it later.
If you're running on a Facebook page and wondering whether it's time, tell me about the business and I'll say honestly whether I think you need one yet.