Social media management — two platforms, done properly, measured in enquiries
Most local service businesses are told to post everywhere. We would rather pick the two platforms your customers actually use, publish on a schedule you can sustain, and report what it produced. No follower-count reporting.
Social media management is easy to sell and hard to hold to account. The work is visible — posts appear, likes arrive — but the line between that activity and a booked job is rarely drawn. This page sets out how we choose platforms, what we publish, what we measure and what it costs. Every number on this page is sourced at the bottom and you can check it. Where a figure is widely repeated but has no traceable primary source, we have left it out rather than pass it on.
Which platforms are your customers actually on?
Start here, because everything else is downstream of it. Pew Research Center surveyed 5,022 US adults between February and June 2025 and asked which platforms they ever use. The answer is not what most social media proposals assume.
84%
71%
50%
37%
Pew Research Center, Americans’ Social Media Use 2025. Fieldwork 5 February to 18 June 2025, n = 5,022 US adults. Published 20 November 2025.
Two things follow. Facebook still reaches roughly seven in ten American adults, which is why a local service business that ignores it is usually acting on its own preferences rather than its customers’. And TikTok reaches just over a third — real, but a minority, and a younger one. If someone proposes a TikTok-led strategy for a business whose customers are homeowners over fifty, ask to see the reach numbers first.
How much attention does each platform actually hold?
Reach tells you who can be found. Time spent tells you how often. Ofcom measured average daily time per user across UK internet users in May 2025: YouTube 51 minutes, Facebook 43 minutes, TikTok 28 minutes, Instagram 20 minutes — and LinkedIn 2 minutes.
That last figure matters more than it looks. LinkedIn is not somewhere people linger; it is somewhere they check. That makes it useful for reaching other businesses and close to useless for repeatedly reminding a homeowner that you exist. The platforms where people spend time are the platforms where low-effort, repeated exposure actually accumulates. Everywhere else you are relying on a single well-timed appearance, which is a much harder thing to plan.
Does the age of your customers change the answer?
More sharply than any other variable. The same Pew survey breaks platform use down by age band. If you know roughly how old your paying customers are, this table decides most of your platform mix on its own.
84% / 80% / 71% / 66%
95% / 89% / 73% / 56%
80% / 59% / 38% / 19%
60% / 43% / 22% / 6%
Share of US adults in each age band who use the platform. Same Pew Research Center survey, n = 5,022, published 20 November 2025.
Facebook is the only platform there that stays above two thirds in every age band. Instagram falls from 80% to 19% between the youngest and oldest groups; TikTok falls from 60% to 6%. For a roofing company, a plumber or an HVAC business whose customers are homeowners aged forty and up, that is close to a decision on its own. For a business selling to renters in their twenties it points the other way. The mistake is not picking Instagram or picking Facebook — it is picking either without first looking at who actually pays you.
Do people actually find local businesses on social media?
Some do, and fewer than used to. BrightLocal surveyed 1,026 US adults in 2025 and found 35% had used Facebook to find or evaluate a local business, 24% Instagram and 8% TikTok. Facebook’s share has fallen in every edition of that survey since 2022.
Read that carefully, because it is easy to over-read in both directions. It does not say social media is finished. It says social media is usually not where someone starts when a boiler fails or a roof is leaking — search and maps are. Social is where they check you are real, recent and still trading before they pick up the phone.
That is a genuinely valuable job, and it is a different job from lead generation. We plan and price social on that basis. If someone sells you social media as your main source of emergency callouts, ask them which survey they are working from.
What does a posting schedule you can actually keep look like?
The one you can still do in month nine.
We will not quote you an industry-standard posting frequency, because the figures circulated for cadence and organic reach have no primary source we could verify, and we are not going to build your schedule on a number we cannot show you.
What we do instead is set the cadence against the material you can realistically supply. A roofing company that photographs two jobs a week has enough for two or three posts a week indefinitely. A business that supplies nothing has about three weeks of stock imagery before the page starts to look like a business that has stopped trading — which is worse than not posting at all. So the schedule is agreed against supply, and if supply dries up we tell you rather than quietly padding it out.
What social media management includes when we run it
Six things. The second and the fourth are the ones that usually get skipped.
Platform selection, in writing
We pick two platforms against your customer age profile and the reach data above, and we write down why. If the reasoning stops holding, we change it and tell you.
A content supply routine
The hard part is never captions, it is getting photographs of real work. We set up a shared album on your phone so material reaches us without anyone having to remember.
Planning, scheduling, publishing
A month planned ahead and approved in one sitting, then scheduled and published on time. You are not fielding drafts all week.
Inbox and comment monitoring
Enquiries land in Facebook and Instagram inboxes and sit there unread. We watch them during working hours and route anything that looks like a job straight to you.
Profile setup, done once
Hours, service area, contact route, cover imagery and a pinned post that says plainly what you do and where you do it.
Reporting you can argue with
Enquiries, messages, profile visits and clicks, with the raw figures attached so you can check them rather than take our word for it.
How will you know whether any of it is working?
Four numbers, reported every month. None of them is follower count.
Counted one by one, not estimated. A message asking for a price is an enquiry. A message asking a question about a photograph is not, and we do not count it as one.
How many people looked you up. This is the number that moves when social is doing its real job: supporting a decision someone has already started making elsewhere.
Tracked separately from every other traffic source, so social is never credited with work that search did.
Our accountability number. If we said twelve and delivered seven, it appears on the report in the same size type as everything else.
Social media management pricing: three commitments, published
We publish the price because it is predictable. What varies is how much of your own material we have to work with, and that changes how much we shoot — not the monthly number you agreed.
30 minutes
We look at who your customers are, where they already spend their time, and whether social is even your best next move. If it is not, we will say so and tell you what is.
Agreed before work starts
Platform selection, the content supply routine, a month of posts planned and scheduled, inbox monitoring in working hours, and a monthly report. One number, agreed up front, no day rates.
Optional
If you genuinely cannot supply photographs of real work, we can come and take them. Priced per visit and only added when you ask for it.
Social media management: the questions we get asked
Will you post on every platform?
No. Two, chosen against your customer age profile, with the reasoning written down. Spreading the same effort across five platforms produces five dormant-looking pages instead of two active ones.
Do I have to supply photographs?
It is by far the best outcome and we make it close to effortless — a shared album on your phone. If you cannot, we can arrange content capture as a separate line item. But a page fed entirely on stock imagery will never look like your business, and people can tell.
How quickly will I see enquiries?
We do not promise a timeline, because we cannot control it and neither can anyone else selling you social. What we do commit to is that messages, profile visits and clicks are reported from month one, so you watch the trend form or fail to form rather than waiting to be told.
Is social media better than a Google Business Profile for a local business?
For most local service businesses, no. BrightLocal’s 2025 survey found 35% of US adults had used Facebook to find or evaluate a local business, while search and maps are where most urgent demand lands. If you can only fund one, we will usually tell you to start with the profile.
Do you buy followers or use engagement pods?
No. Neither produces customers, both breach platform policy, and an inflated follower count makes your real engagement rate look worse rather than better.
What happens if I want to stop?
You keep the pages, the assets and the access — they were always yours. We ask for a month’s notice so the last scheduled month runs out cleanly instead of stopping mid-week.
Tell us who your customers are. We will tell you which two platforms are worth your time.
Thirty minutes, no obligation. If the honest answer is that social is not your priority right now, we will say so — and tell you what is.
Book a 30 minute consultation
Where this fits with the rest of your marketing
Technical SEO
The work that decides whether Google can crawl, render and rank the pages you already have.
Google Business Profile management
For most local service businesses this outranks social media as a source of enquiries. Start here.
Web design Houston
The site everything else points at. Built to turn a visit into a phone call.
Industries we build for
Roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical and six more trades, each with its own page.
Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Social Media Use 2025”. Fieldwork 5 February to 18 June 2025, n = 5,022 US adults. Published 20 November 2025.
Ofcom, Online Nation 2025, using Ipsos iris data for May 2025. Published 10 December 2025. Average daily time per user among UK internet users.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2025, n = 1,026 US adults. Published 29 January 2025.
Figures we were offered and chose not to publish: platform organic-reach percentages and industry-median posting frequencies. Neither has a primary source we could retrieve and check, so neither appears above.