Your Facebook page works for Facebook, not for you
Social media talks to people who already know you. Here are the three things it will never do for you, and how to make it work alongside a real site.
It is the sentence we hear most often on the island, in both languages: "I already have a Facebook page, it does fine." Often that is true. The page is alive, the photos are good, the comments come in.
But the question was never framed correctly. A social account and a website do two different jobs.
Is a Facebook or Instagram page enough instead of a website?
No, though not for the reason most people assume. Social media speaks very well to people who already know you; a website makes you findable by people who have never heard your name. Those are two different audiences, and the second one is the one landing at the airport tomorrow.
What social media does better than a website
Worth saying plainly, because nobody tells you this when they are trying to sell you something.
Today's catch, photographed at eleven in the morning. A trip cancelled because of the swell. The feel of a Friday night, which ten polished photos will never capture. The regular who comments, and whose friends see him comment. A website does all of that badly. Your page does it well, for free, in thirty seconds.
Do not delete your account. This was never a choice between the two.
The three things social media will never do for you
Make you findable to someone who does not know your name. A guest in a hotel room types "boat rental Sint Maarten" or "best restaurant Grand Case". She does not type your business name, because she has never seen it. That search plays out on Google, on a Google Business Profile and on web pages. Your Instagram account is not in that race: to find it, you already have to know what to look for.
Answer a specific question, reliably. Your rates, your Sunday hours, what a full day charter includes, your cancellation policy. A post sinks down the feed and is gone in three days. A story dies in twenty four hours. Nothing on a social platform stays at the same address long enough to become a reference. That is also why assistants like ChatGPT do not cite you: they need stable, openly accessible pages, which we covered in how to get recommended by ChatGPT.
Belong to you. Your page costs nothing, and that is precisely the problem: you own nothing on it. One account suspended by mistake, one algorithm change, one content category that suddenly performs worse, and the audience you spent six years building becomes unreachable overnight. You cannot export your followers, you cannot email Facebook, you cannot negotiate. A domain name, on the other hand, is yours.
"But all my customers come from Instagram"
That is probably accurate, and it is the most common trap. You are measuring the people who showed up. The ones who never found you leave no trace at all; they do not message you to say they booked somewhere else.
Which is why the only thing worth looking at is what a stranger sees.
Who does what
Three places, three jobs, and they have to agree with each other.
The website carries what does not change: prices, hours, services, booking, both languages. It is the source, the one Google crawls, the one assistants quote, and the one your customer can find again at the same address two years from now.
The Google Business Profile is the crossroads. It is what appears on the map when someone searches nearby, and it is where your stars come from.
Social media brings all of it to life and sends people back to the site. On one condition: the link in your bio has to land on a page that answers something, not on a silent homepage. If someone taps after seeing a photo of a dish, send them to the menu, not to your logo.
A contradiction between the three costs you more than an absence. A visitor who reads three different opening hours stops trusting you on everything else. If you want to see what the full setup looks like once it is running, our web agency in St Martin page shows it end to end, with live demo sites you can test yourself.
The two minute test
Pick up your phone. Turn the wifi off. Search in English, and type what a stranger would type: what you do, plus the name of the island. Not your business name.
Write down what comes up in the first ten results. If you are not there, you have just seen exactly what a visitor sees, and no amount of posting will change that result.
This is not a promise of page one on Google, and nobody can make you that promise. It is a measurement you can take again yourself in six months, and compare.
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