Guide
Why a Facebook page isn't enough
Plenty of small businesses run entirely on a Facebook page, and for some of them it works for years. It is still a fragile arrangement, and the failure modes are worse than most owners realise. Here is the honest accounting.
What a Facebook page does well
It is free, it takes ten minutes, and people already know how to use it. For keeping existing customers up to date — new hours, a promotion, a photograph of yesterday's job — it is genuinely good.
It also has real reach among people who already follow you, which is more than most small business websites manage on their own.
None of that is in dispute. The problem is what happens when someone who does *not* already know you goes looking.
What it cannot do
It cannot rank for service searches. Nobody finds a Facebook page by searching 'emergency plumber near me'. Those results are websites and map listings.
It cannot hold detail. Prices, service areas, process, credentials, galleries — there is nowhere for any of it to live where people will find it later.
Posts vanish. Something posted in March is functionally gone by May. A website page keeps working for years.
You cannot control the presentation. Your page looks like every other page, next to advertisements for your competitors.
The risk people underestimate
You do not own it. Pages get disabled — sometimes for a genuine violation, often by automated systems that make mistakes, occasionally because a personal account got compromised and took the business page with it.
When it happens there is no phone number to call. Appeals are automated and slow, and businesses regularly wait weeks or never get the page back at all.
If that page is your entire customer-facing presence, your business becomes unfindable overnight, and every review you accumulated goes with it.
The arrangement that actually works
Use both, for what each is good at. The website is the thing you own — findable, detailed, permanent, and where the phone number and prices live.
Facebook and Instagram are where you stay visible to people who already know you, and where you post the work as you finish it.
Every social profile should link to the site. If a platform disappears tomorrow, you still have the thing that people find when they search your name.