A website or a social page

Reach works in opposite directions

A social page pushes to people who followed you. Reach depends on whether the platform shows your post, which is a decision made by somebody else about their own product.

A website is pulled. Somebody looks for a service, finds a page that answers it, and arrives having already decided they need what you do. That is a far warmer arrival.

Neither replaces the other. A business with an audience and no search presence is invisible to strangers; a business with search and no audience has nowhere to announce anything.

The timing differs as well. Social reaches somebody who was not thinking about you, which is hard work. Search reaches somebody who is looking right now, which is the easier half of the job.

Depth and permanence

A post has a life of a few days and then effectively ceases to exist. A page answering the same question keeps working for years and gets better as it accumulates links.

The format matters too. Eight hundred words explaining what goes wrong with a job does not survive in a timeline, and that is exactly the material that produces enquiries.

Our page on topic clusters covers how pages compound. Nothing on a social platform compounds in the same way, because the platform is designed around recency.

Control, and what that is worth

Your page exists at the discretion of a company you have no relationship with. Accounts are suspended in error, rules change, features are removed, and appeals frequently go nowhere.

That is not a reason to avoid social platforms. It is a reason not to make one the only route to your business, which is a position a surprising number of small businesses are in.

Our page on one business, one domain covers why the address you own is the thing everything else should point at.

Your following does not move either. An audience built on one platform cannot be carried to another, which is why a route to your own list or your own site is worth building while the audience exists.

What each one is better at

The list below is the honest split. A business that uses each for what it is good at does far better than one that tries to make either do both jobs.

• Social: reaching people who already follow you
• Social: conversation, questions and recommendations
• Social: announcing something that is happening now
• Website: being found by somebody searching for a service
• Website: explaining anything that needs more than a paragraph
• Website: being quoted as a source
• Website: existing next year regardless of anybody's rules

Being found by strangers

Search results for a service in an area go to pages built around that service. A profile is not one, and no amount of posting changes what a profile page is structurally.

The same is true of answer engines. Our page on choosing sources covers what gets cited, and a social profile is rarely a candidate.

So a business relying entirely on social reach is competing only for people who already know it exists, which is the smaller half of the available work.

How they should work together

The site is the destination and the social page is the route. Every post that answers half a question should link to the page that answers all of it.

Put the site address in the profile, the bio and anywhere else the platform allows. Our page on moving beyond a social page covers the transition in detail.

And keep the facts identical in both. A phone number that differs between the two is the most common cause of a customer reaching nobody.

If you can only do one

Build the website. It is findable by people who do not know you, it holds the material that persuades, and it cannot be removed by somebody else's moderation decision.

A social page with no website is a business that can only be recommended, never discovered. That ceiling is invisible until you notice growth has stopped.

If time is the constraint, a small honest site beats an active social page for almost every service business, because the site works while you are on a job.