Let us start with the honest part. If Facebook and TikTok are bringing you work, they are doing a real job and nobody should tell you to stop. A tradesperson with twenty thousand followers has built something most businesses never manage, and it cost them nothing but time.
So the question is not whether social media works. It is whether it is enough on its own, and what happens on the day it stops.
You are building on land you do not own
Everything you have posted sits on somebody else’s platform, under rules you never agreed to and cannot see. That is fine right up until it is not.
Accounts get suspended by mistake. Reach gets throttled with no warning and no explanation. A platform decides videos are in and photos are out, or the other way round, and six months of what was working stops working. None of that is a prediction. Ask anyone who built a business on a page in 2015 and watched the organic reach quietly disappear.
The uncomfortable bit is that you cannot take your followers with you. There is no export button for an audience. If the account goes, the audience goes, and you start again from nothing.
A website is the one part of your online presence you actually own. Your domain, your pages, your customer enquiries, in your inbox. Nobody can suspend it, and no algorithm decides how many people see it.
Nobody opens TikTok looking for an emergency plumber
This is the part people miss. Social media and search are two completely different moments.
Social media catches people who were not looking for you. They were scrolling, your video came up, it was good, they followed. That is genuinely valuable, but they did not need you today.
Search catches people at the exact moment they need the job doing. It is half past ten at night, there is water coming through a ceiling, and somebody types “emergency plumber near me” into Google. They are not opening TikTok. They are not scrolling a feed. They want a phone number in the next thirty seconds.
That person is ready to pay today, and if you are not findable in that moment, they will ring whoever is. This is also why getting your business onto Google Maps matters so much, and a Google Business Profile works far better when it has a real website behind it.
An AI cannot recommend a business it cannot read
Here is the one almost nobody has caught up with yet.
More and more people now ask an AI assistant instead of searching. “Who is a good electrician in Slough?” They get three names and a sentence about each, and they ring one of them.
Those tools read websites. They do not scroll your TikTok. They cannot watch your videos, and they largely cannot see inside a Facebook page. If your entire business lives on social media, you are invisible to them — not ranked badly, not further down the list, but simply not there at all.
We wrote about this in more detail in your customers are asking AI, not Google. The short version is that being named by an AI is becoming its own route to work, and a website is the price of entry.
A profile cannot answer the questions that win the job
Think about what somebody actually needs to know before they let you into their home.
What exactly do you do, and what do you not do? Do you handle small jobs or only full installations? How much does a typical job cost? How long does it take? Are you insured, are you qualified, are you registered with anything that means something? What happens if it goes wrong afterwards?
A social profile cannot hold that. A bio is a line and a half. Your best explanation is buried in a video from March that nobody will scroll back to find. So instead they message you, and you type the same five answers you typed last week, and half of them never reply anyway.
A website lays it all out once, in order, on a page anyone can read at eleven at night without messaging you first. A page per service, in plain words, with prices or at least honest price ranges. People who read that and then call you have already decided. They are not shopping around any more, they are checking you are available.
It also filters. If you do not touch commercial work, saying so stops three wasted phone calls a week. A profile cannot do that. A page can.
Sending people to your door
If you have premises — a shop, a workshop, a yard, a unit people collect from — this matters even more.
Your website is where your address lives in a form that Google, Apple Maps and every AI assistant can read and pass on. A full address, a map, your opening hours, parking, and which entrance to use. That is what turns “I might go there” into somebody actually turning up.
The same applies if you travel to customers instead. Spelling out the towns you cover does two jobs at once: it stops people forty miles away ringing for a job you would never take, and it reassures the person two streets over that you are genuinely local. A social profile has one location field, if it has one at all. A website can say exactly where you work and where you do not.
Your address on your own website also has to agree with your Google listing, your van and anywhere else you appear. When those match, everything gets easier to find. When they disagree, search engines quietly trust you less.
Followers are not the same as customers
It is easy to look at a follower count and read it as a pipeline. Often it is not.
A video can do well everywhere except the twenty miles you actually work in. Ten thousand followers scattered across the country is worth less to a local business than four hundred people in one town. Views measure reach. They do not measure whether anyone nearby can hire you.
Enquiries are the number that counts. How many people contacted you this month, and how many of those turned into paid work? That is the figure worth watching, and a website gives you somewhere to send people where that can actually be measured.
Use both, for what each is good at
This is not social media versus a website. Used properly they do different halves of the same job.
Social media is how people find out you exist and see that your work is good. It is the shop window, and you should keep posting. A website is the shop. It is where somebody lands when they are serious, gets their questions answered, and gets in touch.
So put your website link in every bio you have, and send people there when they ask a question you have answered properly already. Put your finished work on your own site as well as on the feed, so it is still yours in three years. And rather than bolting a live feed onto your site, be aware that embedding a social media feed usually costs you more than it gives you.
So, do you need one?
If you are happy with the work you have, own your audience outright, and never want to be found by anyone who has not already scrolled past you — then no, you can carry on as you are.
For everyone else, a website is the part of all this that you keep. It is working at midnight, it answers the questions you are tired of answering, it puts you on the map for the person who needs you today, and it is the only version of your business that AI assistants and search engines can actually read.
Worried about the cost? See what cheap website design really buys you before you decide.
Your social media is rented. This is the bit you own.