I know many small physical businesses who get almost nothing from their website, and a huge amount from their 10,000 followers on Facebook. Coffee shops, tradesmen, bars.

Facebook isn't a competitor to most B2B products, but it's defintely the Excel of the B2C world.

This is completely anecdotal. I could just as easily argue that the vast majority of businesses across cultures, demographics, socioeconomic factors use a variety of tools to promote themselves. In Canada, we have plazas, traditional websites, and more to get the word out. B2B, B2C, whatever you want to call it.

For the other cases you mentioned: Groups to collaborate, Events to organize - these are all completely underwhelming alternatives to other market products. The biggest tragedy of Facebook is that it has enormous scale but it can't write comprehensive products that satisfy all of that scale uniformly. You get the lowest common denominator, which is why customers go for niche alternatives.

Excel is not Facebook. Yes, Facebook is big. Excel is big in its industry. However, Excel has just enough of a balance between niche and scale. Excel is about computation and reporting. It solves a very specific need that is fortunately applicable in all types of applications. As soon as you try to go outside the bounds of what Excel can do (large data analytics, more customized reporting, interactive applications) you stop trying to rationalize Excel and start using other tools. People do the same with Facebook. More people do it with Facebook because Facebook doesn't effectively solve as many core needs.

Unfortunately especially with restaurants i am seeing more and more have only a Facebook page. I really don't like this trend. For example the format is stale and the information is often poor - many whom only have a Facebook site don't even publish a menu!

But they have a need: publish content for free because screw website and domains and servers and all that crap. They know how to facebook, they probably know they won't win a website award but their need is satisfied (come up on google for restaurant in x that does y). They are better served by million other things, but they know facebook. Check them out and you'll find they probably won't have a verifyed listing on google or tripadvisor.

There is a vast untapped market of digital semiliterate that only waits to be tapped. See also: medium. Why that and not wordpress.com? Because they speak the right language.

Your last sentence is interesting. Can you elaborate on what you mean by "speaking the right language"?

Well wordpress start describing itself as a hosting plarform, medium as a community of writers and readers. Two totally different target.

Yeah that makes sense!

I can't argue with stale format other than to say that if you're visiting restaurant websites wanting a unique browsing experience then I expect you're in an extreme minority. Would you happen to also be opposed to bootstrap?

As for poor information, I don't see how that's the result of Facebook. Plenty of restaurants neglect all sorts of information on their websites. Add in that plenty didn't bother with websites before, but now have a Facebook page, I'd say Facebook has drastically increased the amount of information available on restaurants.

Restaurants need opinions from customers to influence other customers. Tripadvisor, and a bit less Yelp, are the main tools in internet to promote their business.

I'm finding more and more new businesses are avoiding the self-hosted Wordpress option.

People are increasingly aware of security as a problem - it only takes one business you know to have their WP install hacked and start distributing malware before you say "hey, maybe not" - and things like Squarespace offer very attractive themes, no need to keep updating the install, and a lot less technobabble.

(I must admit I'd almost never recommend someone without technical knowledge set up their business website using self-hosted WP these days. Go for a WP-specialised host that'll handle the caching and security, or go for something like Squarespace.)