Social media for plumbing companies, and where your own market takes over

The burst pipe never sees your feed, and the repipe does

Panic calls go to whoever is visible at the moment of panic. Social is aimed at the expensive work a household considers slowly.

A flooded floor at midnight ends in a search, a map listing and whoever picks up. Nothing you posted last Tuesday competes for that call, and a plan sold on the promise that it will is a paid search plan wearing a different name.

Planned work behaves nothing like that. A repipe, a lateral replacement, a water service line, a whole-house filtration decision: those get researched for weeks, argued about at a kitchen table, and narrowed to two or three companies that already feel known.

Familiarity is the thing a feed actually builds. Being the name a neighbor types into a thread, or the trucks somebody half recognizes, decides more of that shortlist than any single post does.

So judge it on the right clock. A quarter of posting shows almost nothing you can point at, and most accounts are abandoned in exactly that window. Tell whoever approves the budget on day one that a year is the honest unit of time here.

Your water and your waste system decide what the account is about

Two towns an hour apart put a plumber on completely different calls all year. Write about the calls you actually run.

Where the water comes from changes the work. A municipal supply with aggressive chemistry, a private well carrying iron and sediment, hard water that shortens the life of every heater in the county. Each one produces a different repeat complaint and a different conversation on the estimate.

Waste does the same thing. An area on sewer talks about roots, bellies and backups at the main. An area on septic talks about drainfields, pumping intervals and what people put down a drain. Content built for one reads as irrelevant in the other, and homeowners can tell within a sentence.

The age of the housing stock decides the rest. Galvanized, polybutylene, cast iron, copper of a particular vintage. What is behind the walls where you work is what you should be filming, because a homeowner recognizes their own decade of house instantly.

The question to ask about your own market: what are the three complaints your phone takes most often, and which of them come from the water rather than from the fixture? Those three are most of your content for the year.

Say the town or the neighborhood out loud in the caption. Real place names stop a scroll better than any hashtag, and a regional marketing name is how a resident decides you are based somewhere else.

Ask in writing before the truck is unloaded, not while the camera is out

A homeowner who nods in the driveway can still be unhappy once a neighbor recognizes the house.

Get permission before the job starts, in writing, even a text message that says yes. Say what you intend to post and where it will run, because people agree to a photo and are startled by a video.

Then keep the property out of the shot. House number, street sign, facade, mailbox, the car in the driveway, and the location tag on the post itself. Describe the place as a ranch built in the fifties, a house on the east side, a building out in the county, and stop there.

Under the sink and inside the wall is the better footage anyway. Nobody stops scrolling for a front elevation, and everybody stops for the section of pipe you just cut out and set on the floor.

Commercial work needs a second yes. Whoever let you in is often not the person who can approve a video of the building, so ask the manager or the owner before anything is published.

Say what the job involved, never what the code requires

Keep procedural language general and keep diagnoses inside houses you have stood in.

Requirements around permits, backflow, venting, water heater replacement and what a landlord owes a tenant vary by jurisdiction and get amended. A confident procedural claim in a caption gets corrected in public, or screenshotted and repeated for years.

Point the viewer at the office that can actually answer: their own building department, their water utility, their association, their inspector. Naming exactly who to call is more useful than a rule half remembered on camera, and it never goes stale.

Advertising rules deserve a direct check of your own. Some states require a license number to appear in advertising, and a social profile or a paid post can count as advertising. Ask what your state requires rather than assuming, since both the rule and the definition of advertising vary.

Comments asking what is wrong get the same restraint. Answer generously but generally, say what would tell two likely causes apart, then move the real conversation to a private message. A confident opinion typed into a thread comes back attached to somebody else's repair bill.

One technician who talks while he works beats a policy that everyone films

Cast the person who already narrates the job to the homeowner, and let the rest of the crew off the hook.

Somebody on your payroll explains things out loud without being asked to. He is the account. One or two willing people outlast a rule that every truck must contribute, which stops quietly within about a month.

Pay for it. Filming time on the clock, or something for the clips that get used. Unpaid on-camera work ends without an announcement.

Everyone else can shoot silent. Hands and pipe with a voice added later works fine, and it solves the crew members who want nothing to do with being on camera.

Give the crew a rule short enough to survive a bad day. Two or three named shots, nothing staged: the failure before anyone touches it, the section that came out, the finished work. There is no reshoot, because nobody reopens an excavation or goes back under a slab for a better angle.

Every clip has to explain itself to the person who was not there. The spouse who missed the estimate is often the one deciding, so it needs to make sense forwarded, with no sales line attached to it.

Build the year around the stretch that fills every board in town

Every area has one predictable stretch that fills the board. Prevention goes out before it, honest scheduling during it, and the ugly photograph after.

Name yours first. A hard freeze, a hurricane and the week the power comes back, a wet season that floods crawlspaces, the holiday stretch when a full house finds every weak drain. Ask your dispatcher which week broke the board last year and build around that one.

Prevention only works ahead of the event. During it, the same advice is a reminder of what somebody failed to do, and it reads as smug. Publish early enough that a homeowner can still act on it.

While it is running, say plainly how booked you are. People forgive a wait they were warned about and remember an unkept promise for years.

Afterward, publish the damage. The split pipe, the ruined ceiling, the failed connection sitting on a tarp. It is the least polished thing you will post all year and usually the most watched, because it makes the advice concrete.

Hold the promotions for that stretch. A coupon landing in the middle of a neighborhood emergency is the sort of thing people bring up a year later.

A short list of people who send work beats a long list of followers

Property managers, agents, building supers, restaurant operators and caretakers all refer plumbers, and almost nobody in the trade makes content for them.

These are the relationships that turn one job into a standing account. A manager with a portfolio of units, an agent who needs a sewer scope before closing, a super who calls the same two companies for everything that leaks.

Write to them directly and it shows. Response windows, what happens after hours, how you document work for an owner, what a scope video looks like when you hand it over, how you behave in an occupied unit.

That audience wants the opposite of what a homeowner wants. Keep the two streams separate and alternate on purpose, because one post written to please both sounds like a national brand and moves neither.

Which gatekeepers matter is a local question. A resort town runs on house-watch caretakers, a college town on landlords, a downtown on restaurant operators and building engineers. Ask who has sent you work twice in the past year, and write for those people by name.

Be useful where you are not allowed to sell, and answer the bad review for the next reader

Neighborhood groups move real work, and your review replies are read more closely than your posts.

Somebody asks who to call and neighbors answer. Those threads book jobs, and a vendor who pitches inside one gets removed by a moderator, so answer the question that was asked with nothing attached to it.

Then publish the same answer on your own account. A resident can link it or paste it months later with your name still on it, which a buried group comment will never do.

Answer a bad review once, in public, calmly. Say what changed and take the rest private. Relitigating the invoice or the timeline loses the argument in front of the only audience that counts, which is the person deciding whether to call you.

Ask for reviews in person, once, at the moment the experience reads well, and never in exchange for anything. The right moment differs by job: sometimes standing in a dry basement, sometimes a week after a repipe once the pressure has been noticed.

Two posts a week you can hold in your worst month

Consistency beats volume, and an account that goes quiet for a season reads as a company with problems.

Set the pace at what survives your busiest stretch rather than what feels possible in a slow week. Cut both posts from footage already sitting on somebody's phone, so publishing never waits on anyone finding time to create something new.

Facebook first in most markets, because the neighborhood groups and the recommendation threads live there. The same vertical video goes to Instagram with no extra production.

Keep a plain video channel as a library. Explainers stay findable there for years after they leave a feed, and a homeowner searching what a sewer scope involves can land on your technician.

Add a fourth place only if somebody on the payroll genuinely wants to make content for it. Otherwise it becomes the profile that has not been touched since spring, which is worse than never having opened it.

Let a post earn the budget before it gets one

Let everything run unpaid first. A post a neighbor shared has proved something. A post your office is proud of has proved nothing.

Boosting on a schedule spends the budget on the average post, which is the one worth the least. Pick the one or two a month that traveled on their own and put money only behind those.

Cap the paid map to where your trucks can actually get. Reach into an area you cover badly produces calls you have to turn down, and people remember being turned down.

Grade the channel on messages, saved posts, callers who name you and estimates that close. Reach, views and follower counts are diagnostics, useful for telling you whether a post worked, not for telling you whether the channel is paying.

Put the question at intake. Have whoever answers the phone ask how the caller found you, write the answer down, and read a quarter of them at once rather than watching a dashboard weekly.