Hiring someone to manage your social media is worth it if you can’t post consistently yourself, and most owners can’t. Consistency is the whole job. A page that posts three times a week for 90 days beats a page that goes viral once and then goes quiet, because customers read silence as closed. This is what I’ve seen managing social media for a local business in Halton Hills, what I learned growing my last one, and why going viral is the wrong goal.
The account that stopped in 2021
The most recent page I took over belongs to a contractor, and the Instagram was actually decent. The photos were good and the work spoke for itself. The last post on any of their accounts was June 22, 2021.
That’s five years, so anyone who found them on Instagram in that time saw a business that looked like it had closed, even though the work never stopped and only the posting did.
The first thing I changed was the name and the bio on both platforms, because neither said what they do or where. And then I started posting three a week, so two carousels or single photos and one reel, and that’s it. We’re three weeks in, which is too early for numbers, so I won’t quote you any yet.
What does consistent actually mean?
Owners tell me they’ll post when they have a moment, and then a job runs long, then it’s a weekend, and then it’s been six weeks. I don’t think that’s a character flaw, because running a business is a full day and social media is the first thing that falls off the truck.
The problem is what the platform does with a gap. Instagram and Facebook take about 90 days to work out what a page is about and who should see it, and that clock restarts when you go quiet. Post for two weeks, get nothing, stop, and you never reach the part where it starts working. Most owners quit right there, frustrated that nothing went viral.
Does going viral mean anything?
I can say that because I’ve done it. I grew a page of my own before this business by posting three reels a day, every day, and it grew fast, and what I learned is that going viral grows a following and not a business.
So the part that matters for a local business is that going viral grows a following and not a business. A cleaning company in Georgetown doesn’t need thousands of strangers watching a reel, it needs the handful of people in Georgetown who are looking for a cleaner this month to open the page and see that it’s alive.
So the goal for a local page is smaller and more useful than viral, and it’s really just to show up every week so that when someone checks, the last post was Tuesday and not 2021.
Done right, it’s marketing, and it isn’t free because it costs you time or money, but it’s the kind that puts your name and your face in front of the exact people who’d hire you, and I’ve watched it turn into clients. That’s more than a flyer on a counter ever did.
What does it take to do social media properly?
If you want to know why owners fall off, this is the list for one week, done right.
- Research what’s working in your trade right now
- Come up with the ideas
- Write the scripts and the captions
- Film it
- Edit it
- Schedule or post it
- Reply to the comments and the DMs, every day
Done properly it’s a full-time job, which is why it sits with the website on the list of things owners mean to do and don’t. Done at 11 pm after a full day it’s a rabbit hole. You watch what everyone else is posting, you feel like you’re not doing enough, you want it to be perfect, and the post never goes up. It really doesn’t need to be perfect, so just let it go up.
What do I need from you to run it?
Photos and videos, and that’s really the whole list.
I tell you what to shoot, like the job site, the before and after, or you and the crew, thirty seconds on your phone, and then you send it over. I do the research, the ideas, the scripts, the captions, the editing and the posting, and I keep an eye on the comments and messages.
If you own a service business in Georgetown, Halton Hills, Erin, Milton, Oakville or Guelph and your last post was a while ago, the Free Online Audit shows you what a customer sees when they look you up, socials included. Start there, or read how I do social media management in Halton Hills.