Social media accounts are free. Most people already know how to use them. Your customers are already there. Setting one up takes an afternoon rather than a week. These are not small advantages, and dismissing them would be dishonest.
And yet there is a persistent feeling, among those who have been running a business for a while, that a social media profile is not quite the same as a website. That something is missing — something permanent and independent that a feed of posts cannot quite provide. This feeling is worth examining rather than dismissing.
What Social Media Does Well
Social media has genuine strengths, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. For a business that already has an audience, social media is an excellent way to stay visible. If you have a following on Instagram or a Facebook page with active followers, you have a direct line to people who have already expressed interest in what you do. You can share updates, photographs of your work, availability, offers, and responses to questions, and those people will see them.
Social media is also excellent for a certain kind of informal trust. A feed of real photographs, honest captions, and occasional glimpses behind the scenes builds a kind of familiarity that a more formal website sometimes does not. Prospective customers who find your Instagram and scroll back through months of consistent, honest posts are being given a very good sense of what it would be like to work with you.
For some types of business — photography, food, crafts, fitness — visual social media platforms can be genuinely powerful sales channels in their own right, particularly if you are willing to put in the consistent effort they require.
What Social Media Cannot Do
The limitation of social media, and it is a significant one, is that it is not yours. The platform owns the audience. The platform owns the rules. The platform can change its algorithm tomorrow and the posts you worked hard on will be seen by a fraction of your followers. The platform can suspend your account, sometimes for reasons that are genuinely unclear, and you will have no recourse and no backup. The platform can decide, as Facebook effectively did for many business pages in the mid-2010s, that organic reach is no longer something it wants to provide for free.
There is also the question of discoverability. When someone who has never heard of you searches Google for "bookkeeper in Chester" or "mobile dog groomer Exeter", a social media profile is at best a weak signal. Google gives weight to its own products — Maps and Business Profile listings — before it gives weight to social profiles. A well-built website, by contrast, can rank consistently in search results for relevant searches in your area, year after year, without you having to pay for advertising or post new content every three days.
You can do everything right on social media — post consistently, build a following, earn goodwill — and then wake up one morning to discover that the platform changed the rules and none of it reaches anyone any more.
A social media profile also cannot give you a professional email address, a contact form that goes directly to your inbox, a full description of your services with pricing, a portfolio of your work laid out on your own terms, or a place that looks, to a new customer who has just found you via Google, like a permanent and credible business. These are things a website does routinely and a social media profile does not.
The Changing Role of AI in Search
There is something new worth considering in 2026 that was not a factor even two years ago. AI-powered search tools — including the AI summaries now appearing at the top of Google search results — are increasingly drawing on the content of websites to generate their answers. When someone asks "who is a good electrician in Wolverhampton", the AI is reading websites, not scrolling Instagram.
A business with a well-written website has a chance of appearing in these AI-generated summaries. A business with only a social media profile does not. This is a relatively new development, but it points in a consistent direction: having a website that clearly describes what you do, where you do it, and what makes you worth choosing is becoming more valuable, not less.
The Honest Verdict
Most small businesses that are serious about growing will eventually want both a website and a social media presence. They serve different purposes, and the businesses that use them most effectively tend to use their website as the permanent foundation — the place that never changes, that works at three in the morning, that Google can send strangers to — and use social media as the ongoing conversation with people who have already found them.
If you are just starting out and cannot do both at once, the question to ask yourself is: how do I expect new customers who have never heard of me to find me? If the answer is "through Google" or "by searching for someone who does what I do in my area", you need a website first. If the answer is "through word of mouth and people sharing my work", social media may be sufficient for a while.
But the word of mouth eventually runs out. The social media following eventually plateaus. The businesses that keep growing past that point tend to be the ones that invested in a website early enough that it has had time to accumulate authority in Google's eyes, attract reviews, and become the first result when someone in their area goes looking.
Starting that process costs less than most people think, and the sooner you start, the sooner it begins to work.