The storefront quietly moved
Over the last decade, the handle replaced the address. Businesses paint an Instagram name on the van, put a link-in-bio where a homepage should be and take their orders in DMs. It feels current, it costs nothing up front, and the followers are right there.
That move can be tested with numbers. The best ones come from Pew Research Center, which asked 5,022 US adults between February and June of 2025 which platforms they use.
Half the country is not in the room
Instagram is used by 50 percent of American adults. TikTok sits at 37 percent, up from 21 percent in 2021. Facebook, the biggest of the three, reaches 71 percent. Flip each of those around. A business whose storefront is an Instagram profile has closed the door on half the country. On TikTok it writes off nearly two-thirds. Even Facebook, the best case, leaves three in ten adults outside.
The skew gets sharper with age. Among adults 65 and older, 19 percent use Instagram, which means more than eight in ten of them cannot be reached there at all. If your customers run older or wealthier, that is not a rounding error. The median repeat home buyer in America is 62 years old, per NAR. The people with the money are the people least likely to be in the feed.
Are you in business only for people on Instagram? You are not. Your storefront should not be either.
You are not the customer there
Of Meta’s $164.5 billion in 2024 revenue, $160.6 billion came from advertising, per its own annual report. That single line explains the whole relationship. The product is attention, the customer is the advertiser, and you and your followers are the inventory. The feed decides which of your followers see any given post, and that dial is tuned for the advertising business, never for yours. Terms change without notice. Accounts get locked by mistake, and there is no phone number to call when yours does. No scandal in any of that. That is the deal, and it is worth reading before you build a business on it.
The door policy problem
There is a quieter cost. The platforms increasingly wall their content off: profiles that half-load for logged-out visitors, prompts to sign in before scrolling, posts that search engines cannot index. Someone without an account cannot really see you. Neither can anyone who uses a different platform from the one you picked. The question-searchers and AI answer engines we wrote about in the realtor series cannot either; they read the open web and cite what they can reach.
A website has no door policy. Anyone with the link can see it. No account, no app, no algorithm deciding whether your own audience hears from you. It can be found, cited and sent to a group chat by someone who has never heard of the platform of the day.
Rented address, no lease
Platforms also end. Vine shut down in 2017 with the follower counts of an entire creator economy inside it. Google+ closed in 2019. A handle is not property. It is a username in someone else’s database, and it can be taken away. A domain is yours. It carries your email, survives a change of host and still holds every page you have published ten years from now.
What social is for
None of this argues for deleting the apps. Platforms are good at reach and discovery, and they are good channels. The mistake is making a channel the flagship. Post the reel, run the page, work the DMs. Then point all of it somewhere you own, where the whole country is allowed in and nobody stands between you and the person trying to give you money.
Questions business owners ask
My customers are all on Instagram anyway. Does this apply to me?
Even in Instagram’s best age group, adults 18 to 29, usage is 80 percent. That still leaves one in five of your ideal customers out of reach. Every other age group is worse. And the platform skews in ways you did not choose: 55 percent of women use it against 44 percent of men. A storefront should not come with a demographic filter you never asked for.
A website costs money and Instagram is free
Free means you are the inventory. Meta’s ad revenue above is what that is worth to them. What you pay on a platform is reach you do not control and customers you cannot see. Next to the hours you already spend making content for someone else’s address, the cost of owning your own is trivial.
Do I still need to post on social?
Yes. Do both, with a hierarchy. Platforms surge and fade. TikTok nearly doubled its reach in four years. Vine went from cultural force to shutdown notice in about the same span. A flagship you own outlives your strategy on any of them. Keep posting. Just make sure the posts land somewhere that will still exist when the platform of the day is not.
Sources: Pew Research Center, Americans’ Social Media Use 2025, published November 2025; Meta Platforms, 2024 Form 10-K.