Social media for an Atlanta plumbing company working under a mature canopy

The root ball on the driveway is the only picture of the tree anybody believes

A homeowner cannot picture the inside of their own lateral, and under this canopy the thing your camera finds usually has a culprit attached to it.

Thirty feet of old pipe with a root mass sitting in a joint explains an entire estimate without a word of persuasion. Nobody has seen the inside of a sewer line and everybody wants to.

Then bring the evidence up into daylight. A root ball pulled out and laid on the driveway beside the section of pipe it grew through is the single most passed around photograph a plumbing company here will ever take.

Narrate it while you are looking at it. Which joint let go, how old the pipe looked, what the homeowner had been noticing for months without connecting it to the drain.

Filming a monitor is its own small craft. A screen in daylight is mostly glare, so hood it with a jacket or shoot it in the truck, and hold still long enough that a viewer can read the picture.

The intown stock gives you the best material. Old laterals in short sections with a joint every few feet are close to an invitation, and a street of prewar bungalows in Decatur or Brookhaven is full of them.

The tree that broke the line is often not your customer's

Roots arrive from whichever hardwood is nearest, and several governments across this metro treat large trees as protected, so the tree in your footage can be both somebody else's property and a regulated object.

Never point at the fence line on camera and never name a neighbor. A homeowner who ends up in a dispute with the house next door because of your video will not recommend you to anybody, however good the repair was.

Say what you found and stop there. Roots in the joint, this much of them, coming from this direction. Which trunk they grew from is a property line question, and it belongs to the two owners rather than to your caption.

Cutting roots is not always the plumber's decision either. Protection for large trees varies from one government to the next across this metro, so the tree question can outlast the plumbing question, and the job you are filming may be waiting on somebody who has never spoken to you.

Access is the story worth telling instead. Getting a machine to a lateral under a stand of hardwoods, with low limbs over the yard and roots nobody is allowed to cut through, is a genuinely interesting problem that every household on a shaded street recognizes.

Show the tree still standing over a closed trench at the end. Under this canopy that is what people are anxious about, and one photograph settles it faster than a paragraph.

Red clay photographs for about an hour after it is cut

Fresh clay is the most local looking material in this metro, and one afternoon storm turns the same trench into something that reads as carelessness.

Cut clean, red clay holds a square wall and a color everybody here recognizes on sight. It says where the job is before the caption does.

Two hours into a summer storm that same excavation is soup, the spoil pile has slumped and there is water standing in the bottom. Shoot the trench early, and use the wet footage only when the story is the recovery: the pump running, the plates going down, the crew making the site safe before anybody leaves.

Clay does not stay in the yard. It stains a driveway apron and a sidewalk, and rain carries it downhill onto whatever is below, which is often the neighbor. Photograph the wash down when the crew packs up, as deliberately as you photograph the dig.

Give the spoil pile its own frame. Clay comes out in blocks rather than in shovelfuls, and a pile that is obviously solid material explains why a yard cannot simply be raked flat before the crew leaves for the day.

In January a repaired lawn photographs as a scar

Warm season grass across this metro is brown for months, so one restoration reads as damage in winter and as a finished job in June.

Bermuda and zoysia go dormant through the cold half of the year. Somebody scrolling past your after shot in January sees a brown strip through a brown lawn and reads it as a ruined yard, which is the opposite of why you took the picture.

Say so in the caption, or hold the wide shot that week and post the trench detail instead. Either beats publishing a photograph that argues against you.

Then go back in the spring. A lateral replaced in January is worth a return trip in May, when the yard has closed over and the only evidence left is a slightly greener line running toward the street. Put the visit in the calendar the day you close the job, because nobody remembers a winter yard by May.

The spring photograph is the one that sells the next dig. A neighbor who watched a machine tear up a yard in January and later sees that yard whole has the complete answer to the thing that stops most people from booking excavation work at all.

All of that comes out of this metro's trees, dirt and grass. The parts that travel anywhere, who films, what a caption should never assert, and what deserves a budget, sit on our plumbing social media page at /industries/plumbing/social-media.