Pick one job. Proof of work for people who are deciding, recruiting, or staying present with customers you already have. Post for that job and judge it on that job. A local business feed trying to do all three at once does none of them, and worse, cannot be measured.
Most small business social accounts are not failing at content. They are failing because nobody ever decided what the account is for, so the posting is whatever felt postable that week and the review at the end of the quarter is a shrug.
Job one: proof for people deciding
The highest value use for most local service businesses. Somebody has your name, they are three quarters convinced, and they look you up before calling. What they find should make the decision easy.
That means finished work, in ordinary conditions, with a sentence about what the job actually involved. Not a montage. A photo of a real thing you did last week with two lines about the complication you found and how you dealt with it is worth ten pieces of designed content, because it is the only kind a competitor cannot copy.
Job two: recruiting
Underrated, and for a lot of trades in this region it is the constraint on the business rather than customer demand. If you cannot hire, growth is theoretical.
Recruiting content looks different. It shows the van, the crew, the truck, what a normal day is, what the work is like in February. It is aimed at somebody who already does this job somewhere else and is wondering whether your shop is better. That person is not impressed by a stock photo of a handshake.
Not sure what your account is even for?
Tell us what the business needs most right now, customers or crew, and we will tell you what to post and what to stop posting.
Get a free website and marketing auditJob three: staying present with past customers
Cheap and slow. You are not selling, you are staying in the memory of people who already know you so that when the thing they need comes up, you are the name that arrives.
Seasonal reminders, a note about a service window filling up, an answer to something several people asked this month. It works, it works quietly, and it takes a year before you can see it.
What should I actually post?
The work, mostly. Before and after, the problem you found behind the wall, the thing you would do differently, the reason a job took longer than expected.
Two rules that save a lot of grief. Get permission before showing anybody's property or business in a way that identifies them, and never show anything that could embarrass a customer, even anonymously. A photograph of an alarming repair is a good post and a bad idea if the homeowner recognizes their own basement.
| If the job is | Post |
|---|---|
| Proof for people deciding | Finished work, ordinary conditions, what the job involved |
| Recruiting | The crew, the vehicles, what a normal day here is like |
| Staying present | Seasonal reminders and answers to questions people asked |
Which platform?
Whichever one your customers are already on, and for most local businesses in this region that means Facebook first. That is not a fashionable answer and it is what the phone calls suggest.
Then one more, chosen for the job. Instagram if the work is visual, a neighborhood group if your customers are homeowners in a defined area, LinkedIn if you sell to other businesses. Two accounts kept up beats five accounts abandoned in March.
How do I know whether it is working?
Not likes. Ask new customers where they heard about you and write the answers down for three months. It is unsophisticated and it is more reliable than any dashboard for a business this size, because the sample is small enough that platform analytics tell you very little.
If the job is recruiting, count applications. If the job is proof, watch whether people arrive at the phone call already knowing what you do. That second one is a real and observable effect and almost nobody tracks it.
What I would stop doing
Holiday graphics. Motivational quotes. Reposting the same industry article every business in the trade reposted that week. None of that is proof, none of it recruits, and none of it makes anybody remember you.
And I would stop posting daily. A local business posting three good things a month is doing better than one posting five thin things a week, because the second one runs out of material in six weeks and then the account goes silent, which looks worse than never having started.
The honest limitation
Social rarely produces direct inquiries for a local service business. It supports the decision, it keeps you in mind, and it helps you hire. Anyone telling you a posting schedule will fill your calendar is selling you something, and we would rather say plainly that this is a supporting channel than pretend otherwise and have you judge it against the wrong standard.
The place it does produce inquiries is when a happy customer shares a post about work you did for somebody they know. That is worth designing for: post the kind of thing a customer would want to share, and ask.
The social side of what we do sits inside the Growth Engine, the paid side is on the digital marketing page, and it comes up most with the local service businesses we work with. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.