The Case for a Facebook Page Only
Let’s be fair to it. A Facebook page costs nothing. You can post a photo of today’s job from the truck. Customers can message you. Your regulars see your updates. For a business that runs on repeat customers and word of mouth, it feels like plenty.
And for some businesses it is. If every customer you want already knows your name, a page is fine. Keep reading anyway, because that’s a smaller group than most owners think.
Who Never Finds a Facebook-Only Business
The customer who doesn’t know you exist. That’s the whole problem in one sentence.
When somebody in Frederick needs a roofer, they don’t open Facebook. They open Google and type “roofer near me.” Google shows them a map and a list of websites. Facebook pages mostly don’t show up there. Google can’t read most of what’s on your page, and it ranks what it can read below real websites. So the search that should have found you finds three competitors instead, and you never know the call existed.
That’s not a few customers. For most local businesses it’s the majority of new ones. Google handles billions of searches a day and a huge share of them are people looking for something nearby. Facebook is where your existing customers hang out. Google is where new ones come from.
What Else a Page Can’t Do
- It doesn’t show what you charge, what you cover, or how you work. Your page is a feed. The post that explains your pricing is forty scrolls down under a photo of a fish somebody caught.
- It looks like every other page. Same blue header, same layout as the guy who does it out of his garage. A customer can’t tell a twenty-year business from a two-week one.
- You don’t control it. Facebook changes what people see, how often, and whether your posts reach anybody at all. Pages that used to reach a thousand people now reach forty unless you pay. Get locked out of your account, and your entire online presence goes with it. It happens constantly, and there’s nobody to call.
- Some customers refuse to use it. A growing number of people don’t have Facebook or won’t log in to see a business. To them, you have nothing.
- You can’t book, quote, or sell on it in any real way. A messenger conversation at eleven at night is not a booking system.
The One Case Where a Page Is Fine
You’re full. You have a waiting list. You’re not taking new customers and don’t want to. Then a Facebook page to keep the regulars informed is all you need, and I’ll tell you that to your face rather than sell you a website.
Everybody else is leaving money on the table. Not a little.
What It Actually Costs to Fix
A real website for a small business doesn’t have to be a five-figure project. Five to eight pages that say what you do, where you do it, what it costs to start, and how to reach you. Built to load fast on a phone and to show up in Google for your town and your trade. That’s a few thousand dollars, and you can pay it over time. It’s less than one decent job for most trades.
Keep the Facebook page. It’s good at what it does. Just stop asking it to do the job of a website, because it can’t.
Do This First, Even Before a Website
Claim your free Google Business Profile. It puts you on the map in Google searches, and it’s the single fastest way to start getting calls from strangers. I wrote up exactly how to do it in the Google Business Profile guide. Do that this week. Then let’s talk about the site that should be on the other end of the click.