A Facebook page is free, takes twenty minutes, and lets you put a photo of yesterday’s job in front of people who know you. For a business finding its feet that is a perfectly sensible place to start. It becomes a problem only when it is the whole of your presence for years, because of five things it cannot do — none of which are about Facebook being bad.
What it does well
Keeping existing customers and local followers warm. A steady trickle of finished jobs in a feed is genuinely persuasive to people who already half-know you, and there is no faster way to publish one. Local groups and recommendation threads are real sources of trade work, and a page with recent activity is what someone checks after your name comes up in one.
The five things it cannot do
- Appear for "electrician in Reading". Those searches are answered by Google’s local results and by websites. A Facebook page occasionally surfaces for your business name; it very seldom surfaces for the searches that produce most trade enquiries.
- Be read by everyone. A meaningful share of customers — often the older ones with the larger jobs — either have no account or are logged out. They hit a prompt to sign in where your phone number should be.
- Have service pages. There is no page to rank for "bathroom installation" because there is no page. A feed is a timeline, not a structure, and search works on structure.
- Be relied on. Pages get restricted, mis-flagged, or hacked, and the appeal process is a form. It rarely happens, and when it does there is no one to ring.
- Belong to you. The audience, the reviews and the content are on someone else’s platform under someone else’s rules. So is the decision about who sees your posts.
The one that has changed recently
Customers increasingly ask an assistant — "who should I get to fix a boiler in Slough?" — rather than typing a search. Assistants read pages. A Facebook page is largely inaccessible to them: behind a login, thin on text, and not structured as an answer to anything. A plain website with a page that answers the question is the kind of thing they can actually use, which is a genuinely new reason not to rely on the page alone. We have written about what assistants can and cannot read.
Keep it — and put something underneath it
This is not an argument for deleting anything. The two work well together: the page keeps people who know you warm, the website catches the ones searching cold, and each should link to the other. Our page on moving from a Facebook page to a website sets out what changes and what does not.
The practical first step is making sure that someone who searches your business name finds something of yours at the top. We’ll build that page free in 48 hours so you can see it on your own business before deciding anything.