Somebody hears your business name. Maybe a neighbor mentioned you, maybe they saw your van. Before they call, they look you up. That is not a marketing funnel, it is just what people do now, and it takes them about forty seconds.
They find your website. Then, directly underneath it, they find your Facebook page. The cover photo is a stock image with your old logo on it. The last post is from 2017. It is promoting a spring special that ended eight years ago.
Nothing on that page is a lie. It is all just old. And it has told them something you did not intend to tell them.
Absence is neutral. Staleness is evidence.
This is the part that gets missed, so it is worth being precise about it.
If a small business has no Facebook page at all, almost nobody notices and nobody cares. There is no gap to interpret. Plenty of good businesses are not on social media and the absence reads as a choice, or as nothing at all.
A page that stopped in 2017 is different, because it is not an absence. It is a record. It shows that at some point you were doing this, and then you stopped, and nobody has been back since. A stranger cannot tell the difference between “busy and focused elsewhere” and “this business is winding down.” They only have the artifact in front of them, and the artifact says nobody is home.
For a service business this lands harder than it does for a shop, because the thing being bought is your attention and follow through. A profile you abandoned is a small, free sample of how you handle things you have committed to.
You do not choose whether it is part of your search results
When somebody searches your business name specifically, your own properties tend to fill the first page. Your website, usually first. Then, very often, your social profiles, because platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn carry enough authority that a profile page ranks easily for the name written on it.
You do not control that placement. The platform earned it, not you. Which means the profile is part of what people see when they look you up whether you maintain it or not, and the only decision actually available to you is what it says when they get there.
That reframes the whole question. This is not about whether social media is worth your time as a marketing channel. That is a separate argument, and I have made the case elsewhere that social does not rank you and should not be sold as though it does. This is about the fact that a page with your name on it is being shown to people who are deciding whether to call you.
The four states a profile can be in
Only two of these are problems.
- Current. Posted recently, details correct. Fine, obviously.
- Dormant but accurate. Nothing posted in a year, but the name, logo, description and link are all correct and there is nothing expired on it. This is fine. Genuinely fine. Nobody is counting your posts.
- Stale and wrong. Old logo, old positioning, a phone number that no longer works, an offer that expired, hours that are not your hours. This actively costs you.
- Abandoned and forgotten. You do not remember the password, you are not sure who else can post to it, and you have not looked at it in years. This is the worst one, because it is the only state where something bad can happen without you seeing it.
The goal is not to move everything into the first state. Most small businesses should be aiming for the second one, deliberately, and stopping there.
What to actually do, in order
1. Find out what exists
Open a private browser window and search your business name. Look at the first two pages of results. Write down every profile that appears.
Do it in a private window specifically, because signed in to your own accounts you will see a version of the internet that has been personalized around you, and you are trying to see what a stranger sees.
Expect to find at least one you had forgotten. A Twitter account from a rebrand. A Yelp listing somebody else created. A LinkedIn company page a former employee set up. A Google Business Profile that was auto generated from public data. Those exist whether you made them or not.
2. Decide one of three things for each
Revive it only if you will genuinely keep it going. Be honest here rather than optimistic.
Park it, which is the right answer for most of them. Explained below.
Remove it if it is a duplicate, a platform you will never use again, or something a former employee created without authority. Fewer accurate profiles beat more abandoned ones.
3. Park the ones you are keeping, properly
Parking is not neglect. A parked profile is accurate, current looking, and quiet. That combination is completely respectable and it is where most small businesses should land.
- Correct business name, spelled the way you write it everywhere else.
- Current logo and a cover image that matches your website rather than your last one.
- A short description that says what you do now.
- A working link to your site, and an email address somebody actually reads.
- No fake hours. If you are not reliably open at those times, leave hours off entirely rather than setting expectations you will miss at nine at night.
- No expired offers, no price ranges you no longer honor, no services you stopped offering.
- Reviews off if you are not deliberately collecting them. An empty rating on an old page reads worse than no rating at all.
Then stop. A parked profile needs nothing else from you.
4. Audit who can get in
Do this even if you think you know the answer, because this is the item with actual downside rather than just embarrassment.
Old employees, former contractors, an agency you stopped working with, a marketing tool you connected in 2018 and forgot. Any of them may still be able to post as your business.
On most platforms there are two separate doors. There is the list of people with direct access to the page, and there is access inherited through a business account, which does not show up in the first list at all. Removing somebody from one does nothing about the other. Check both.
While you are there, revoke any third party app or scheduling tool you do not currently use. Those permissions do not expire on their own.
This is the same category of problem as not knowing who holds your domain registration, which is worth thinking about properly in what you actually own when you hire someone to build your website.
5. Only now, decide about posting
If you do want the profile active rather than parked, the thing that kills it is a burst followed by silence. Five posts in a fortnight, then nothing for a year, leaves you exactly where you started with newer wallpaper.
Tie posting to something that already happens rather than inventing a schedule. If you publish anything on your own site, one post per article costs you nothing extra because the work is done. If you photograph finished jobs anyway, one of those. The rule should be attached to existing work, not to a calendar, which is the difference between a cadence you keep and one you abandon in March. That argument in full is in posting five times a week is not a strategy.
The one technical thing worth doing
Once your profiles are correct, tell your own website about them.
There is a field in structured data called sameAs, which sits in your site’s Organization markup and lists the other places on the internet that are you. It is how you say, in a form a machine reads, that this Facebook page and this LinkedIn company page and this website are all one business rather than three unrelated things.
Be realistic about what it does. Search engines have been inconsistent about how much weight this carries, and anyone promising you a knowledge panel from a few lines of markup is overselling it. What it reliably does is remove ambiguity about which accounts are yours, which matters more than it used to now that AI assistants assemble answers about businesses from scattered sources rather than showing you ten links.
It takes ten minutes and it is the only part of this a search engine actually reads.
What this is and is not worth
It will not bring you traffic. It will not improve your rankings. If somebody sells you social media management on either of those promises, that is worth a hard question.
What it does is control the second thing a prospective client sees after your website, at a moment when they have already heard your name and are deciding whether to bother calling. That is a narrow job, but it is the last thirty seconds before a decision, which is an expensive place to have something wrong.
It is also the cheapest item on any marketing to do list. One afternoon, no budget, no ongoing commitment, and it never needs doing again if you park rather than revive.
If you would rather have somebody go through it with you, along with the rest of what people find when they look you up, that is part of how I approach the social side of a search program. Tell me your business name and I will tell you what I find.
