Both, and the split is decided by tourism.
If your city gets meaningful tourist traffic, most of your paid budget belongs in search. If it does not, most of it belongs in social. That is the rule, and the reasoning behind it explains almost every version of this question I see asked in operator forums.
You need a presence on both regardless. The question is only where the money goes.
Tourists search, locals do not
Somebody visiting your city has a free afternoon and no idea what is available. They type "things to do in" your city, and whatever comes back is the entire consideration set. That is a person actively looking to spend money who has no prior loyalty to anyone.
Search ads on that phrase are one of my favourite things to run for clients in tourist towns, because the intent could not be clearer.
Now think about the people who live in your city. They are not googling what there is to do at home. They already know. No amount of search budget reaches somebody who is not searching.
That asymmetry is the whole argument.
In a non-tourist city you are building a community instead
If tourism is not going to bring you strangers, your growth comes from being present in the minds of people who already know the town.
Social does that. Not as a sales channel but as a standing reminder that you are there, that people had a good time last week, and that this weekend is available. Somebody shares a post, their friends see it, and their friends live in your city too. The snowball works because the audience is geographically self-selecting in a way search traffic is not.
That only holds if the content is worth sharing, which is a separate problem. How to build a digital brand people actually want to follow covers it.
Locals do search, just for different words
Here is where people take the rule too far and switch search off entirely.
Residents do not search for things to do in their own city. They absolutely do search for:
- birthday party venues near me
- corporate team building in your city
- what to do with kids on a rainy day
- staff Christmas party ideas
- bachelor and bachelorette party activities
- indoor activities near me
Every one of those is a local, at a moment of high intent, planning an occasion worth several times an ordinary booking. Those are the search terms a non-tourist venue should own even if the tourism budget is zero.
The reverse is also true. A tourist town still has residents, and those residents still have birthdays. Building a local community following in a tourist city is not wasted, it is just not where the first dollar goes.
Your Google Business Profile matters more than either
Before any of this, there is a free thing that outperforms both.
When somebody searches for what you do near where they are, the map results come up before anything else. What decides which venue gets tapped is whose profile has real photos, correct hours, a working link to a page that takes bookings, and enough detail to tell somebody what the place is.
That is free, it takes an afternoon, and it is the foundation of every other piece of local search work. Venues skip it constantly and then buy ads to compensate for it.
How to actually split the budget
Start from what your city is. If tourism is meaningful, weight paid search heavily and keep enough social running to serve the locals. If it is not, weight social and keep a small, tightly focused search budget on the occasion keywords above.
Then check where bookings actually come from after a season and move the money toward whichever one is producing. The rule is a starting position, not a conclusion.