Your website as an asset, social media as a megaphone

01On social media you are a guest in someone else’s house

Opening a Facebook page or an Instagram profile costs nothing, takes ten minutes and immediately gives the feeling of being present. For many businesses it was the first step online, and for some it has remained the only one. It is understandable: the platform offers the stage, the audience and the tools, and asks nothing in return. At least on the surface.

In reality a social profile resembles a shop inside a shopping mall you do not hold the keys to. The mall decides the opening hours, where the windows are, how many people walk past yours and how many are sent elsewhere. It can change the rules overnight, and if it believes you have broken them it can pull down the shutter. You pay the rent in content, in time and, more and more often, in advertising.

The website is the opposite: it is land you own. The domain is registered in your name, the content is yours, you choose the rules, and nobody can decide that tomorrow your customers will no longer find you. It is more work at the start, like building instead of renting. But it is the only thing that remains when fashions change.

02Algorithms that change: who really sees your posts

Many people think that publishing a post means showing it to all their followers. It has not been like that for many years. The big platforms do not show content in chronological order to the people who follow you: a ranking system, the famous algorithm, chooses for each person which posts to put at the top, which further down and which not to show at all, based on what it predicts will interest them most.

This has three very concrete consequences for a business.

1. You compete with the rest of the Internet

Your post about this month’s new offer does not compete only with those of the other shops in the area: it competes with friends’ videos, the news, influencers, recommended content from people your customer does not even follow. There is only one screen, and the platform gives it to whoever keeps the user there longest, because that is how it sells advertising.

2. The rules change without notice

The criteria by which the algorithm decides change constantly: one year they reward photos, the next year short videos, then content that generates comments, then content “recommended” from profiles you do not follow. A business that had found the right formula can see its visibility collapse from one month to the next without having changed anything. And there is no office to ask for an explanation.

3. Visibility is for sale

When the spontaneous reach of posts, what experts call organic reach, is not enough, the platform offers the solution: sponsoring. It is a legitimate model, but it should be seen for what it is: you are paying to reach people who already follow you, and you stop reaching them the moment you stop paying.

None of this is a conspiracy against small businesses: it is simply how a company that lives on attention and advertising works. The point is a different one. A business cannot base the way it gets found on a system it does not control, does not know and cannot predict.

03Followers are not your contacts

“I have three thousand followers” is a reassuring sentence. But what exactly do you own? A number on a profile. You do not have those people’s email addresses, you do not have their phone numbers, you do not know which of them is a customer, which is merely curious, which is a competitor. You cannot write to them when you need to: you can only publish something and hope the platform shows it to them.

And above all you cannot take them with you. If tomorrow you decide to leave the platform, or if the platform loses its audience as has already happened to others in the past, your three thousand followers stay there. Platforms let you download your content, but a list of people who follow you does not become a list of contacts you can write to: for that you would need their consent, which they never gave you.

The website changes this equation. A contact form, a quote request, a booking, signing up for a list of updates: every time a person leaves their details on your website, with their consent, a contact is born that belongs to the business. You can call them back, write to them, serve them better. It is the difference between having an audience and having customers.

04The day the profile is gone

There is a risk people rarely talk about until it happens: the suspension or closure of the profile. The platforms’ terms of use provide for it explicitly. Meta’s, for example, state that in the case of clear, serious or repeated violations access to the products may be suspended or permanently disabled, and that an account may also be deactivated if it remains inactive for a long time or appears to be used without the holder’s permission.

Picture a pastry shop that for years has taken cake orders almost exclusively through private messages on Instagram. One Friday in December someone gets into the account with a stolen password, posts a fake promotion, and the platform blocks the profile. The holiday orders are all in there, in the conversations. The bakery’s phone does not ring, because nobody ever saved the number. What is it worth, at that moment, to have a website with an order form and a list of customers to write to?

In practice, the causes are often trivial:

• stolen credentials: someone gets into the account, posts scams or ads, and the platform blocks the profile to protect other users. How to close this door I explain in the chapter on passwords, two-factor authentication and passkeys;
• a report, justified or not, from a competitor or an unhappy user;
• an automated check that mistakes harmless content for a violation: an image, a word, a link;
• a problem with identity verification of the page’s administrator.

In the luckiest cases the profile comes back after a few days. In others, after weeks of unanswered requests. In others still, it does not come back. And for all that time, if the profile was the only way to find you, your business simply does not exist online.

05The website as a shop window that works for you day and night

Reduced to its essentials, a professional website is a shop window that never closes: at eleven at night, on Sunday, in August, it answers customers’ questions, shows what you do, what you are worth, where you are and how to contact you. It does not get tired, does not get sick and does not need updating every day to stay visible.

But the most important difference from social media is not the opening hours: it is the moment the customer finds you.

Latent demand and conscious demand

On social media you reach latent demand: people scrolling through their phone for a completely different reason, whom your content interrupts. It can work for making a brand known, but the customer was not looking for you.

On search engines you reach conscious demand: people who have a precise need and type it in. “Accountant in Mestre”, “boiler repair Mogliano”, “bilingual digital wedding invitations”. Whoever types that phrase has already decided to look for a solution: they are only choosing whom to turn to. If your website answers that question well, you arrive at the exact moment the decision is made.

What turns a website into a shop window that sells

For the website to reach conscious demand, it is not enough for it to exist. It has to be built, from the start, to answer the questions people really ask. Google repeats this in its guide for content creators: it rewards pages written for people, useful, reliable, that answer a question better than the others. In practice this means:

• a page for each important service, with the name customers use and not the company’s internal one;
• a title and a description for each page, designed to appear in search results;
• content that explains: how it works, how long it takes, what happens next, frequently asked questions;
• proof that you are who you say you are: where you are, who you are, how you work, how to contact you;
• speed on the phone too, because a slow site loses people before it even shows itself: I explain this in the chapter on Core Web Vitals;
• presence on the map for people searching close to where they are, which is the subject of the chapter on local SEO.

Underneath all this is the infrastructure: a site that goes down or responds slowly does not sell, however well written it is. Chapter 1 tells how to choose the website’s house, and chapter 3 how it becomes a portal with bookings and an app.

06Social media as a megaphone, not as foundations

Nothing I have written means social media should be abandoned. It means they need to be put in the right place. A megaphone is a very useful tool: it carries your voice further. But nobody builds a house on top of a megaphone.

The model that works is the hub-and-spoke one: at the center is the website, the business’s home; around it are the channels that bring people toward the center. Social media are one of these spokes, alongside email, Google search, word of mouth and printed material.

Five rules for using social media as a megaphone

07When social media become an obsession

There is one last aspect, less technical and perhaps the most important. Social media are designed to hold attention, and they do it very well even with people who use them for work. The owner who checks the likes on a post while serving a customer, who retakes the photo of a dish ten times, who spends the evening answering comments instead of sorting out the stockroom, is not doing marketing: they are working for the platform.

The warning sign is simple: when the profile’s numbers become more important than the business’s numbers. Followers, views and reactions are vanity metrics: they are pleasant, but they do not pay the rent. The metrics that count are different, and they have been the same since commerce began:

• how many requests for quotes or information came in;
• how many became customers;
• how many customers came back;
• how much each new customer cost, in time and in money.

A healthy business devotes a defined and limited amount of time to social media, with a measurable goal, and then goes back to the real work: the product, the service, the people. The website helps with this too, because it works on its own: a page written well today answers customers’ questions for years, without requiring a new post every day so as not to disappear.

Social media are an excellent way to get noticed. The website is the way to get chosen.Zenith’s notebook

08After the shop window: talking with the acquired customer

The website attracts and convinces; the contact collected becomes a customer. From that moment everything changes: you no longer need to get noticed, you need to stay in touch in a reliable, professional and direct way, without intermediaries deciding whether the message arrives or not.

The main tool of this phase is not a social network, but email: the order confirmation, the appointment reminder, the quote, the invoice, the update on a job. For it to work it has to actually arrive, it has to come from an address the customer recognizes and it has to present itself as a company document. It is the subject of the next chapter, devoted to setting up direct communication with the customer professionally: business email, from the records that protect it from spam all the way to the signature.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Meta, “Terms of Service”: section 4.2 on the suspension and permanent disabling of accounts.
2. Instagram, “Terms of Use”: the rules the platform applies to profiles.
3. Google Search Central, “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content” (in Italian): how Google assesses pages.
4. Google Search Central, “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide” (in Italian): titles, descriptions and page structure.
5. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) (in Italian): consent and people’s rights over their own data.

Chapter updated October 2026. The rules cited come from the terms of use published by the platforms at the same date; how the algorithms work is described in its general mechanism, without reach figures that vary from one profile to another.