Small businesses are told they must be on social media, usually by people who sell social media. The honest answer is that it depends, and for a fair number of trades it is no.
Three questions that settle it
Do your customers actually gather there? A wedding photographer, yes. A therapist, sometimes. An emergency plumber, almost never. Nobody scrolls Instagram hoping to find someone to fix a burst pipe. They search, they ring the top result.
Does your work photograph well? Anything visual has a genuine advantage. Landscaping, baking, hairdressing, before and after shots of any kind. If your work does not show, you will run out of things to post within a month.
Will you keep it up in six months? Be honest. This is the one that decides it, and it is where most attempts fail.
Why an abandoned account is worse than none
Somebody finds you, looks at your page, and the last post is from two years ago. The reasonable conclusion is that you have stopped trading.
No page at all raises no question. A page frozen in 2024 answers one, badly. So if you are not going to keep it going, take the link off your website and let it lie.
One, done properly
The usual mistake is four accounts, each neglected. One is plenty.
Facebook still works best for local trades and for anyone whose customers are over forty. Local community groups are genuinely where recommendations happen in a town like Corsham.
Instagram if the work is visual and your customers are younger.
LinkedIn only if you sell to other businesses.
Ignore the rest unless you personally enjoy them.
What actually works locally
Not polished marketing. Two things:
Photographs of real jobs. A before and after, with one sentence about what the problem was. That is it. It takes two minutes at the end of a job and it is more persuasive than anything written.
Being useful in local groups. Answering somebody’s question about a leak, without pitching, does more for your name in a small town than a year of posts. People remember who was helpful.
What does not work: motivational quotes, stock images, and anything that reads as though a marketing company wrote it.
The thing worth more than all of it
If you have limited time, spend it on your Google Business Profile rather than social media.
Social media reaches people who already follow you. Google reaches people actively looking to buy, right now, in your town. For most local businesses that is not a close comparison, and the profile costs nothing.
Get the profile right, gather reviews, and treat social media as optional. If you enjoy it, do it. If it is a chore you dread, that is useful information: dreaded jobs do not get done, and a neglected account is worse than an absent one.
If the answer is no
That is a perfectly respectable place to land, and plenty of busy tradespeople are there.
Put your effort into the profile, into asking customers for reviews, and into a website that answers the questions people ring you about. That is where the work comes from.
If you want a second opinion on whether it is worth your time, ring me. I have talked more people out of it than into it.