Two questions come up almost every time we build a site for a small business. Does social media actually matter, and should we stick the feed on the website?
The first has a longer answer than people expect. The second has a shorter one than they want to hear.
What social media is genuinely good at
It keeps you in front of people who already know you exist. The customer you did a kitchen for two years ago sees a photograph of last week’s job, remembers you, and mentions you to a neighbour. That is worth having and it costs nothing but the time it takes to take a picture.
It is also proof. A page with forty photographs of finished work says more about whether you are any good than any amount of writing does.
For some trades it goes further. If what you do is visual – landscaping, kitchens, bathrooms, signage, anything where the before and after is dramatic – the work sells itself in a way it never will in a paragraph.
What it is not good at
Finding you the person whose boiler has just packed in.
That is the part people miss. Nobody opens Facebook hoping to find an electrician. They open Google, type their trade and their town, and ring one of the first few. The intent is completely different, and it is why your Google listing and your website do a job that no amount of posting will do.
So the honest answer to how important social media is: it is a reminder channel, not usually a discovery channel. Important, but not the thing that makes the phone ring today.
Now the embed question
Once people accept that social media is worth doing, the next instinct is to put the feed on the website. A live panel of your latest posts, updating by itself, so the site always looks busy.
It sounds sensible. In practice it usually costs you more than it gives back, for four reasons.
It slows the page down, and speed is the thing you cannot afford to lose
A feed embed is not an image. It is a piece of third-party software that loads its own scripts, its own styles and its own tracking before it can draw anything. On a phone on a patchy signal – which is most of your customers – that is the difference between a page that appears and a page somebody gives up on.
Google measures how quickly your pages load and uses it when deciding where to rank you. Trading a measurable ranking factor for a panel most visitors ignore is a poor swap.
A stale feed does real damage
This is the one nobody plans for. You add the feed in January while you are enthusiastic. By September the most recent post showing on your home page is eight months old.
An empty shop window is better than one with last year’s stock in it. A visitor who sees a dead feed does not think “they are busy”, they think “is this business still going?” You have taken your most valuable page and used it to raise a doubt.
It hands your visitors an exit
Somebody has landed on your site, which is the hard part. A feed invites them to click away to a platform built to keep them scrolling. They rarely come back to finish the enquiry.
It brings cookies you then have to declare
Most social embeds set tracking cookies the moment they load. That is your responsibility to disclose, and it means another consent banner in front of your own content.
What to put on the site instead
Links, not feeds
Icons in the footer linking to your profiles. They cost nothing, load instantly, and the people who want to see more will find them. This is the right answer for most small businesses and it is where we start.
Your reviews, as words on the page
Far more valuable than a feed. A review sitting on Facebook only helps people already on Facebook. The same sentence on your website works on everybody who lands there. Copy them across as text, with the customer’s first name and town.
Your own gallery of finished work
The same photographs you post socially, hosted on your own site, sized properly so they load fast. You get the visual proof without the third-party baggage, and the images help you turn up in search rather than sitting inside somebody else’s app.
When an embed does earn its place
There are cases. If you post genuinely often – weekly at least, every week – a feed will look alive rather than abandoned. If your social account is effectively your shop window, with new stock or availability changing constantly, the freshness is the point.
If that is you, put it on a secondary page rather than the home page, and load it so it only appears when somebody scrolls to it. You keep the benefit without paying for it on the page that matters most.
The direction that actually matters
People think about this the wrong way round. The useful flow is not website to social. It is social to website.
If you are weighing up whether you need the website at all, that is worth reading on its own: do I need a website if I have Facebook and TikTok?
Post the photograph, and let the people it interests come to your site, where there is nothing competing for their attention and a clear way to get in touch. Your website is the place where an interested person becomes an enquiry. Social media is one of the roads that brings them there.
One photograph can do three jobs at once: post it socially, add it to your Google Business Profile, and drop it into the gallery on your site. Taking the picture is the work. We went through the rest of that routine in our local digital marketing tips, and if your Google listing is not set up yet, start with getting your business on Google Maps before anything else.
The short version
Social media matters, mostly for reminding people you exist and proving you are good at the job. It is rarely how a new customer finds you in an emergency.
Put links to it on your website. Put your reviews and your photographs on your website. Think hard before putting a live feed on your website, and if you do, keep it off the home page.
If you want a second opinion on yours
Send us your web address and we will tell you honestly whether anything on it is slowing the page down, including embeds you may have forgotten are there. No charge and no sales call afterwards – you can use our free website check or just get in touch.
If you are starting from scratch, our website design for tradesmen page explains what is included, and the prices are published rather than hidden behind an enquiry form.