Nashville, TN

Social media for a plumbing shop working rock, rentals and the county lines

Two facts decide what a plumbing account can show in Middle Tennessee. The ground is shallow limestone, so an ordinary trench becomes rock work that a homeowner has never watched and would very much like to understand. And a large amount of the property in and around the core is somebody's business rather than somebody's home, which changes who can say yes to a camera and what a recognizable porch costs the owner. Add customers whose faces are managed by other people, and county lines that put your trucks on different water systems, and the question stops being how often to post. It becomes what this place will let you record.

Bedrock decides the price, and the trench is the only place it shows

Shallow limestone turns a sewer or water service dig into rock excavation, and nothing else you can film explains an estimate that fast.

Most people here have heard that you hit rock. Almost nobody has watched what that means. A trench that stops dead on a solid ledge, a machine changing teeth, a day of work that moved a few feet: that is the entire argument for a number the homeowner was ready to fight about.

Put two digs side by side. Soft ground in one clip and limestone in the next, same depth, same length, different week. The comparison makes the point without you claiming anything.

Shoot the depth with something in frame for scale. A shovel handle, a section of pipe, a technician standing in the cut. Rock reads flat on a phone screen unless a viewer has something to measure it against.

Rock sets the clock as well as the price. A dig that takes an afternoon in Rutherford County bottomland can take days on a Sylvan Park lot, and a homeowner who watched the ledge stops asking why the crew is still there on Thursday.

The customer in the kitchen may not control their own face

A fair number of households here contain somebody whose name, image and address are handled by a label, a manager or a publicist.

A songwriter, a session player, a touring artist or their family hires plumbers like everybody else. What is different is that a yes from the person standing in the kitchen may not be theirs to give, because likeness and publicity rights are managed by somebody who is not on the job.

So do not treat a friendly nod as permission. If a customer is publicly known in any way, assume the answer has to come from whoever handles that for them, and assume it will take longer than the repair does.

The address matters more than the face. People in that line of work go to real trouble to keep where they live private, and a gate, a driveway or a view out a front window can undo it. A clip that identifies a house is a different order of mistake in this town.

The safe version is the pipe. No manager objects to a length of failed copper on a drop cloth, and the work was the interesting part anyway.

Word travels quickly in that world, in both directions. A crew that handled a private household quietly gets recommended quietly and repeatedly, which is worth a great deal more than the clip you decided not to post.

A porch in your clip can be matched back to the listing

Much of the property around downtown is rented out by the night, and a rental listing is a public set of photographs of the same rooms your crew is standing in.

Short-term rental listings are deliberately vague about the exact address and extremely specific about the interior. Anybody who cared could line up a tiled shower or a porch rail in your video with a listing and know precisely which unit it is.

What that exposes is the owner's business, not only their privacy. A unit with a plumbing video attached to it is a unit with a review problem waiting to happen, and the manager who booked you will hear about it first.

Permission has to come from the owner. A cleaner opened the door and a manager scheduled the call, and neither of them holds the asset. Ask through the manager and expect the owner's answer to take a day.

The clock outranks the camera. If the next check-in is at three, nobody is filming at two, and nobody should be rearranging a shot while the cleaner waits to get in.

Guest belongings never appear. Point at the fixture, the shutoff and the failed part on a towel you brought with you.

Cross into Williamson County and you are on somebody else's water system

Metro Nashville and Davidson County share one consolidated government and one water utility, while the counties around it are served by a patchwork of separate districts.

A job in East Nashville and a job in Franklin or Mount Juliet sit on different systems, with different meters, different pressure and a different office behind them. A caption that generalizes from one to the other is wrong for a large part of your service area.

So name the county in the post. People here say Williamson County, Rutherford County, Franklin and Brentwood long before they say Nashville, and a viewer sorting through plumbers is checking whether you work where they actually live.

The housing follows that line too. Inside Davidson County the material skews old, renovated and frequently run as a rental. Out in the collar counties it is newer, larger and on bigger lots, and the plumbing questions are not the same ones.

There is a practical filming difference as well. A rock dig in Wilson County usually has room for a machine and a spoil pile, while the same job on a narrow East Nashville lot has neither, so the footage looks different because the job genuinely is.

All of that is local. The parts that are not, who holds the camera, what a caption should never claim and how much of this deserves money behind it, are set out on our plumbing social media page at /industries/plumbing/social-media.

Questions we actually get

Our customer is a working musician. Can we post the job at all?: Ask, and ask early, because the answer usually comes from a manager rather than from the person you met at the door. Keep the house out of frame no matter what you are told. A length of failed pipe and a clear explanation is publishable from any household, and it is the part people watch anyway.
Does anybody outside the trade actually care about rock excavation footage?: Homeowners here care a great deal, because it is the difference between an estimate they argue with and one they understand. Show the ledge, the machine working it, and the depth with something in frame for scale. It is the most watched thing a Middle Tennessee plumbing shop can film.
Should we post prices?: Post ranges and reasons rather than a figure you will have to defend later. Showing why a trench through limestone costs more than the same trench in soft ground stays useful for years. A specific number in a caption outlives the conditions that produced it and comes back as a screenshot in an argument.
The property manager approved a video of a rental turnaround. Is that enough?: Usually not. The manager can let you into the unit and schedule your crew, but the property is the owner's asset and the listing is their business. Ask the manager to bring back the owner's answer, and until it arrives, film the fixture and the failed part rather than the room.
We work Davidson, Williamson and Rutherford. Does one account cover all of it?: One account, and name the county on every job. Those are different water systems and noticeably different houses, and a viewer in Murfreesboro or Brentwood is deciding whether your trucks come that far. Alternating which counties you feature does more for that question than any service area page.

What is different here

License numbers belong in advertising, as with the other trades. The more useful local variable is that water source, water chemistry and sewer versus septic service differ between neighboring municipalities, which changes which problems a plumber is actually called about and therefore what the page should be about.

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Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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