I get this question nearly every week, usually with some anxiety attached. "We are doing fine on Instagram and Facebook. Is that enough, or do we need a website and all the rest of it?"
The answers in the market split neatly in two. One half says of course you need a site, SEO and email. The other half says social is all you need. Both halves are selling something.
Let me try a different route. Look at what social media actually does well, what it does not do at all, and then decide for yourself.
Social media does one thing brilliantly
It reaches people who are not looking for you. That is not a small thing. It is genuinely hard to do any other way at the same cost.
If your product is new, or people do not know a solution like it exists, or the purchase is emotional and visual, then social is the right place and it may well be enough for a long time.
I am not one of the people who dismisses that. There are businesses running well with no website at all, and for them everything else is a distraction.
And one thing it does not do
It does not reach the people who are looking for you.
That is not a detail. Someone typing "best [your product] in [your city]" right now is the closest person in the entire market to buying, and they are precisely the person social media does not reach.
The difference is intent. On social you interrupt someone who was expecting nothing from you. In search you answer someone with their hand up.
And that place got wider, not narrower
What many people have not noticed is that "search" is no longer only Google. People ask AI assistants and get answers with sources attached.
Google has published guidance for site owners about this. What struck me in Google's page on AI features and your website is how plainly it says there is no special schema.org structured data you need to add, and that the fundamentals are unchanged: make sure crawling is allowed in robots.txt, and make your content easy to find through internal links.
So the requirement is not some technical feat. The requirement is that you have something readable at all. An Instagram page is not readable in that sense.
But "own your channel" is not free either
Here is the part the people who push email and websites tend to skip.
Email has gatekeepers too. Since 1 February 2024, Google's email sender guidelines require anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts to set up SPF and DKIM authentication for their domain, to set up DMARC, and to make marketing messages support one-click unsubscribe with a clearly visible link.
There is a number attached as well. Google advises keeping spam complaint rates below 0.10 percent and never reaching 0.30 percent.
I raise this not to frighten anyone off email, quite the opposite. I raise it because the popular line that owning your channel makes you free is not accurate. You move from one gatekeeper to another. The second one simply has rules that are written down and stable, which an algorithm does not.
So what is the answer?
The honest one: it depends on how your customer reaches you.
- If your customer discovers you without looking: social media may genuinely be enough, and anything else right now is a distraction.
- If your customer searches with buying intent: you are absent from the most valuable moment in the journey, and no volume of posts compensates.
- If both, which is most businesses: social creates demand and search harvests it. You need both, but not at the same priority at the same time.
A simple test you can run today
You need no tools. Open a fresh browser and type what your customer would type, in their words, not your brand name.
If you are not in the first two results and competitors are, you have a real question to answer. If there are barely any results and nobody is searching, then search is not your channel right now and you can let it go.
That test saves a lot of argument, because it turns the question from an opinion into a piece of information.
The mistake I see most
It is not that people fail to build a website. It is that people build a website as a copy of their Facebook page: photos, a logo, a line about providing the best services, and not a single page that answers a real question.
That site will do nothing, and its owner then concludes SEO is a scam. Sites work when they contain answers, because answers are what gets read and quoted.
And before any of that, there is an earlier question: is the offer itself clear? I wrote about that in how to build a strong offer, and if messages arrive but nothing closes, the problem is usually the last step, as in lots of messages and no sales.
One last thing about followers
If your answer to "is social enough" rests on your follower count, the answer is probably wrong. That number does not pay salaries, which I wrote about in stop chasing followers, and the same logic runs through social media will not help you if the problem is not there in the first place.
If you do conclude you need to be visible in search, the next question is immediately where that sits in the budget next to advertising. KF Agency have a practical comparison in SEO versus paid ads and which suits your budget, which is written in Arabic and is more useful than any general opinion on the subject.
In short
Social media is enough for far more businesses than people admit, and not enough for far more than you imagine. The difference is not company size or industry. The difference is whether your customer searches for you.
Answer that with the test above, then spend your time accordingly rather than on general advice.