Three days before landfall your feed stops being marketing
The pre-storm window is the highest attention your page will ever get, and it is the one time selling anything reads badly.
When a storm enters the forecast, people start looking for practical instructions from anyone local they already follow. An HVAC company has real answers to give.
Post the useful ones. How to secure or protect a condenser, what to switch off at the panel and when, why you should not run equipment during a surge, what to photograph before the weather arrives for an insurance claim later.
Say nothing about pricing or availability you cannot honor. A promise made in the days before a storm gets screenshotted, and a company that could not keep it spends the next year explaining.
Keep it short and readable on a phone with a dying battery. Long posts do not survive that moment, and neither does anything that needs sound.
The most useful post of the year explains how to turn a system back on after the power returns
Restoration is staggered across the metro, so the same question arrives from a different neighborhood every day for a week.
After an outage, most people flip everything back on at once and then call somebody when the air does not get cold. A short explanation prevents damage and prevents a wasted service call.
Cover the honest basics. Wait after Entergy restores power, check the breaker before assuming the equipment failed, watch what happens on start, and know which noises mean stop immediately.
Say clearly what is not a do-it-yourself job. The point is not to talk anybody out of calling. It is to stop the calls that were never repairs and to earn the ones that are.
Pin it and keep it. The same post is useful in every outage after this one, and it is exactly the kind of thing a neighbor sends to another neighbor.
Damp is the complaint people cannot name, so damp is the video to make
In this climate the problem is often moisture rather than temperature, and almost nobody in the feed is making content about it.
A house that reads a comfortable temperature and still feels sticky, a closet that smells, windows that sweat, a system that short cycles and never pulls water out. Those are the questions people ask friends about because they do not know what trade to call.
Explain the mechanism on camera in plain words. Oversized equipment, run time, ventilation, what a dehumidifier does that a thermostat cannot.
Moisture content also travels furthest, because the person watching has been quietly living with it and had no idea it was fixable.
It pulls better work, too. A humidity diagnosis is a longer conversation than a no cool call and it usually ends somewhere more valuable than a capacitor.
Under a raised house is footage nobody else in your feed has
Pier and beam construction gives you a visual nobody in another market can copy, and it answers the question a specific homeowner is stuck on.
Crawling under a raised house with a light and a camera makes a better video than any equipment beauty shot. Ductwork sweating, a return that was never sealed, a unit sitting where water has been.
Homeowners here have almost never seen under their own house. Showing them what is down there is genuinely interesting, and it makes the eventual estimate much easier to explain.
Show where the equipment can and cannot go. A Creole cottage or a double shotgun in Bywater with no attic and no closet is a real puzzle, and watching you solve one is the strongest proof you can offer.
Name the neighborhood in the caption. Mid-City, Algiers, Metairie. People sort houses by neighborhood here, and they want to see one shaped like theirs.
A neighborhood association carries a contractor's name faster than any campaign
Word of mouth in this city runs through associations, block groups and parish-level pages, and the account has to earn a place in them.
Recommendation threads in neighborhood groups produce more calls for good contractors here than most paid campaigns do. You cannot buy your way in, and most groups do not allow you to advertise into them anyway.
Be useful in public instead. Answer the humidity question in a thread with no pitch attached. People remember who helped and admins remember who behaved.
Ask customers to name you when a thread comes up, not just to leave a rating. A specific sentence from a neighbor in Uptown outperforms a page full of stars.
Answer reviews the same way. One calm public reply, what happened, what changed. After a storm week you will get a hard review or two from people you could not reach in time, and how you answer those is read closely.
Hold the scheduled queue when the wind comes, then spend on the post that helped
Automation is the risk in this market, and amplification should follow evidence rather than enthusiasm.
A scheduled promotion that publishes itself during an evacuation is the single worst thing an account can do here. Somebody has to own pausing the queue, and it should be written down before the season starts.
Once conditions calm, the post worth putting money behind is the one people already sent to each other. Saves and shares are the signal. Likes are not.
Keep the boosted map inside what you can dispatch. Orleans Parish and Jefferson Parish are one operational reality, and St. Tammany Parish across the lake is another, so treat the Northshore as its own spend or leave it alone.
Report what it produced. Ask at intake, tag it where the dispatcher works, and never hand an owner a reach number as if it were a booked job.
Questions we actually get
- Does posting during a storm look like we are chasing business?
- It depends entirely on what you post. Instructions, safety information and honest updates read as help. Pricing, promotions and availability claims read as chasing. The line is whether the post is useful to someone who will never hire you. Keep to that side of it and the goodwill is real, and it lasts long past the week.
- Does social media actually book HVAC work, or just get attention?
- Rarely on its own, and never on the timeline an emergency call runs on. What it changes is recognition and trust, so you get called earlier in the list and argued with less on the estimate. Judge it across a season, alongside a demand capture channel that handles the person searching right now. A page with a following and no booked work usually means the content is entertaining rather than useful.
- Which platform matters most for an HVAC company here?
- Facebook, because the neighborhood associations and parish level groups that pass recommendations along are there. Instagram is worth the reuse of the same vertical video. Keep a plain YouTube channel for explainers, since those get found for years. Anything beyond that only if someone on the team actually wants to make it.
- The season never really stops here. How often should we post?
- Twice a week, held steady, beats a burst in the spring and silence in August. Since there is no long dead season to film in, capture footage continuously rather than in a planned window. Ask the crew for one clip a day and edit weekly. In most accounts we see, the failure is not frequency but running out of material in the middle of the busiest stretch.
- People ask about their Entergy bill in our comments. Should we answer?
- Answer the part that is yours. Run time, duct leakage, equipment age, thermostat behavior and humidity are all fair to explain. Leave rates, billing disputes and restoration timelines to the utility and point people there. Answering the part you know builds credibility, and guessing at the rest costs you some.
