Do you need a website if you have got Facebook?

Sometimes the honest answer is no, and this is one of the times it might be. Here is how to tell — and what a page genuinely cannot do for you.

Plenty of trades run for years on a Facebook page and word of mouth, and it works. If that is you and the phone rings enough, nobody should be telling you to spend three grand.

What a Facebook page does well

• Job photos, posted from the ute in thirty seconds.
• People who already know you, checking you are still trading.
• Local community groups, where recommendations actually happen.
• Free, and you already know how to use it.

What it cannot do, at all

Show up when somebody searches your trade. People search Google for a tradie and Facebook for a person. Two different moments, and only one of them is somebody with a problem right now.

Belong to you. Your page lives on somebody else's platform under rules that change without notice. Accounts get restricted for reasons nobody explains, and there is no phone number to ring when it happens.

Answer the question that decides the job. Price, service area, licence, whether you do the specific thing they need at the specific hour they need it. A page cannot lay that out; a page is a feed.

The test: if your page went down tomorrow, would anyone new be able to find you? If the answer is no, you do not have a marketing channel — you have a borrowed one.

What we would actually tell you to do

1. Keep the page. It costs nothing and it is where your existing customers are.
2. Fix your Google Business Profile first — five minutes, free.
3. Only then consider a site, and start with one page rather than ten.