We Don't Do Social Media. Here's Who Should.

When a contractor asks me "do you do social media?", I say no. I'll hand you posts to publish when an article goes live, and I'll set your company pages up so they say the right things about your business. But I don't run the channel, and I'm not going to pretend that a few posts a week from an SEO shop is a social media strategy.

This piece is for the owner of a construction, remodeling, roofing, or trades company who feels like they should be on social media and is deciding who to pay for it. The short answer: you may well need it, and you should buy it from someone who does only that.

The short version

Social media marketing for construction companies is a real discipline with its own learning curve, and the people who are good at it don't also run your search. Buy it separately if you buy it at all. For search engines, your social profiles are a sign of life, not an authority play: they confirm you're a real, active plumber in Charlotte. They don't make you the tankless expert. Your website does that.

What I actually say, and what happens next

Word for word, it goes about like this. "We don't do social media. I'll give you content to post on LinkedIn when it's tied to the articles we're producing, and I'll set up your company pages so search engines see a consistent business. If you want someone running social, I can point you to a couple of people who do that and nothing else."

I've never lost a prospect over that answer. What happens instead is that they relax a little, because most of them have already paid for social media once. Usually it was a small monthly fee to a shop that posted stock-photo quotes on their page for six months, and nothing came of it. They didn't get a bad vendor so much as a cheap one, and there's a hump you have to clear before social pays back. A few hundred dollars a month never clears it. So they've concluded social doesn't work, or they suspect they were doing it wrong, and either way they'd rather talk about the thing that fills the schedule.

Saying no to the channel is also how I stay honest about the rest. Search and content are what I've done for years. Social has its own rules and a different pace, and I'd be learning on your money.

"Full service" is a staffing claim, not a capability claim

Go to the website of any agency that pitches contractors and count the disciplines on the services page. SEO, web design, paid ads, social media, video, email, branding, reputation management. Now go to the about page and count the people.

That's the whole test. If four people are claiming eight disciplines, someone on your account is doing a job they're not good at, and it's usually the one that's easiest to fake. Social media is easy to fake. Anyone can post a photo on Tuesday. It takes real skill to know what to post, when, in whose voice, and how to respond to the comments that come in at 9pm.

LinkedIn is the clearest example. It's a competitive feed, and for a company page with a small following you usually need to pay for reach to get found at all in the early months. The content has to sound exactly like the business, not like an agency. Someone has to be on it every day answering comments and messages, because a comment left hanging for a week reads worse than no post. That's a full-time discipline for the person running it, and an agency that added it as a line item is doing it with whoever was free.

I'd rather be the small shop that does two things well than the one that does eight things at a level you'd notice if you looked closely. We wrote about the same idea from a different angle in You'll Never Talk to an Account Manager. The layer of people between you and the work is where quality goes to die, and a "full service" menu is just that layer with more items on it.

What social media is good at for a contractor

I want to be fair to social, because a hit piece would be dishonest and the numbers don't support one. According to the Pew Research Center's 2025 Social Media Fact Sheet, 71% of U.S. adults use Facebook, and among adults 30 to 49, the age bracket that owns most of the houses you'll work on, it's 80%. Your customers are there. That's not the question.

What social does well for a local contractor:

• Proof that you're real and busy. A page with recent job photos, a few customer comments, and reviews tells a homeowner who found you on Google that the company exists this week, not just in 2019.
• Referral fuel. A neighbor sees the deck you built two streets over, tags a friend, and that friend already trusts you before they call. Social is where word of mouth happens in public.
• A place for the stories that don't fit anywhere else. The van that got stuck, the crew lunch, the before-and-after that isn't a full case study. Owners who post these in their own voice build a following that no agency can fake.

That last point is why I think the owner should be the one doing it, which I'll come back to. Social rewards the person who was on the job and has the photos on their phone. It punishes the outsider working from a shared folder.

What it doesn't do is capture demand. Nobody scrolls Facebook looking for a foundation repair contractor. They scroll Facebook and, four months later, when the floor slopes, they go to Google.

What search is good at

Search is where the customer already has the problem. They type "water heater replacement Asheville" because the water heater died this morning, and whoever answers that search well gets the call. It's demand capture, and it compounds: a page that ranks in month eight keeps ranking in month twenty with maintenance, not reinvestment. That's the whole argument for building your own search foundation before renting attention anywhere else.

The two channels aren't competing for the same job. Social builds familiarity. Search catches intent. A contractor who's strong on both has a customer who found them on Google, checked their Facebook page, saw a job from last week, and called. A contractor who's strong on social alone has a warm audience that can't find them when it matters.

Social media vs SEO: does social media help SEO?

Here's the direct answer, because most articles on this dodge it.

Yes, but not the way people think. Social media is a sign of life, not an authority play. Search engines, and AI search engines especially, find your social profiles easily. What they don't do is spend much time reading your posts. They're checking that a business exists, what category it's in, whether the contact information matches the website, and whether anyone's home.

A plumber in Charlotte with an active Facebook business page, recent posts, and a handful of reviews is easier for Google and for an AI assistant to confirm than a plumber with no page at all. And both of those are in better shape than the plumber with a page that hasn't been touched in a year and has zero reviews. To a machine that's deciding whether to recommend you, that one looks like a dead business, or at least one that isn't active day to day.

But the confirmation is general. It says "this is an active plumbing company, people seem to like it, and it works in this area." It doesn't say "this is the tankless water heater specialist in Asheville." If that's who you want to be, you have to say so on your own website first, in detail: the services, the pricing logic, the owner's name and background, the neighborhoods you work in. That's where search engines go for specifics. Then they look outward at your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page, your LinkedIn company page, and the other legitimate profiles, and check that the story matches. Profiles confirm. The website specifies.

Two things worth knowing before you chase any of this for SEO's sake. First, search engines can't see the numbers behind the curtain. Your reach, your engagement rate, the analytics you see when you're logged in: none of that is visible to Google. What's visible is what's public: posts from customers, comments, reviews, and the follower count. Second, social media helps you get found on social media, and that's useful if your people are there. Just remember that's not the only place they are.

If you want both, hire both

Some contractors should have a social media strategist. If you're a remodeler with a strong visual portfolio, a landscaper whose work photographs well, or a builder selling to an audience that spends real time on Instagram, a person who does that all day will get you results a generalist won't.

So hire that person separately. Pay them for social, pay someone else for search, and don't let either one tell you they'll throw in the other. You'll pay twice only if you buy two vendors who each claim both channels. Two specialists who each claim one costs about the same and you get two people who know what they're doing.

Give the social person a way into the work: access to the job photos, fifteen minutes with the crew lead every couple of weeks, and the articles as they publish so the two channels point the same direction. And ask them the same questions you'd ask any marketer. What does the first ninety days look like, what should I expect to see and when, and what happens if we stop.

The $1,500-a-month question

Say you've got about $1,500 a month for marketing, and it's supposed to cover the website and content, the Google Business Profile and reviews, some ads, and social. Then a slow month hits and it drops to $1,000. What goes first? Here's how I'd answer.

At that budget it was never going to cover all four, so the real question is the order. My answer is the same every time. Social is the first thing to cut from the paid budget, because it's the one thing a shop owner or a tradesman can do better in-house than anyone they'd hire at that price.

Think about what a $300-a-month social vendor is working with. Your photos, delivered late, without context. Your voice, guessed at. Your customers' questions, which they never hear. Now think about what you have: the best photos, taken on the job, the stories from the calls and the site visits, and the exact way you talk to customers. If you post half as often as the vendor would, in your own words, it will be better. Social is the easiest channel to bring in-house because it runs on things you already have.

The rest of the list doesn't work that way. Ads take technical skill and real strategy experience, and mistakes cost money the same day. The Google Business Profile and reviews are straightforward but need steady follow-up: you'll ask for reviews in person anyway, but someone should be optimizing the profile and checking on it every month or so. And the website and content need a seasoned strategist, someone who can look at your market and your competitors and tell you where the opening is, then build toward it. The small tasks in that bucket (swapping photos, adding a service page, fixing a layout) are individually easy and collectively a time sink. That's the stretch where owners spin their wheels and quietly stop. We wrote about that stretch in Marketing Is Simpler Than You Think and Harder Than You Want.

So at $1,000 a month, the money goes to the website and content and to the Google Business Profile, ads wait until there's a foundation for them to land on, and social becomes a Sunday-night habit with your phone.

What we do instead

I said we don't do social media. Here's the part we do, so you're not left guessing.

For every client, I set up the company profiles so they affirm the business the way a search engine wants to see it: a Facebook company page, a LinkedIn company page, Yelp, and the other directories that matter for the trade. Same name, same address, same phone, same category, same description. That's citation work, and it's part of the search foundation, not a social strategy.

And for every article we publish, I hand you four posts, two for LinkedIn and two for Facebook, written in your voice, on your dashboard, with a copy button. Post them when you like, or don't. They're there so the work search produced gets a second life without you writing anything.

Here's what that looks like in practice. One engineering client of mine posts nothing on social at all. I built the pages, they sit there confirming the business is real, and the firm ranks fine because the website carries the specifics. A remodeling client posts once or twice a week when the owner has time, which is the honest rhythm for someone running a company. Neither one is running a social media program. Both are in better shape than the contractor paying $300 a month for stock-photo quotes.

If you want the channel run properly, hire someone who does only that. If you want to know what search would do for your business first, let's start there.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start

If you want to know where your search foundation stands before you spend anything on social, book a Digital Strategy Session. It's a look at your market, your competitors, and the gap between them, and it'll tell you whether social is the next dollar or the fifth one.