A few years back I needed some help from a plumber. I was reaching out to a few local trades to see if they had a website I could look at their past work before employing them. Some said no, straight off. One in particular did all his own social media posts. That was enough for him, he said.
I tried to explain something to him. He doesn’t own that Facebook page. Meta does. If the platform changed its rules, or his account got flagged for no good reason, every photo of every finished job and every customer who found him through it could disappear overnight. He wasn’t fussed. And if I’m honest, I understood why. That page had brought him work for years. Why would he listen to a stranger needing help with his bathroom.
The kind of business this still happens to
It doesn’t come up much anymore. Most businesses know by now that they need some kind of presence online. But there’s still a type of business where this conversation happens, plumbers, electricians, tree surgeons, the trades that have run the same way since the 1980s. Decades of word of mouth. A loyal set of customers. A website feels like something built for someone else’s kind of business, not theirs.
There’s a bit of suspicion in it too. Paying someone to build something they reckon they could knock together themselves on Facebook in an afternoon. I get that. It’s not a daft thought. It’s just a wrong one.
Facebook is younger than the business
Here’s the bit that gets me. A business trading since the 1980s has been going for longer than Facebook has existed. Facebook turned up in the mid 2000s. A business with forty years behind it has spent more than half that time without it. Somehow, in the last fifteen years or so, it’s become the one place that business lives online. That’s an odd thing to build your whole presence on, this late in the day.
What you don’t actually own
A website is something you own. You pay for it, you decide what’s on it, and it stays there. A Facebook page is rented space. The rules can change without warning. An algorithm decides who sees your posts, not you. Accounts get suspended over things that have nothing to do with how the business is run. That’s not a guess. It happens to small businesses every year, and most of them never see it coming.
If that page disappeared tomorrow, what would be left. A phone number, maybe. Word of mouth, which never really goes away. But every customer who only ever found you through that page goes with it.
This isn’t an argument against Facebook, or Instagram, or whatever else you use. They’re good for what they’re good for. Reaching people. Sharing a photo of a finished job. Keeping in touch with regulars. The argument is against putting everything in one place you don’t control.
A website is the bit you own outright. Your number, your reviews, your work, all sat somewhere that doesn’t answer to anyone else’s terms and conditions.
If this has got you thinking
I’m not after a hard sell here. If you’ve read this far and you’ve never really thought about it before, that’s the point of writing it. Have a think. If it’s on your mind, give me a call and we’ll have a proper chat about it, no pressure either way.
