A plumber, electrician or roofer with a commercial side has two very different customers: homeowners, and the property managers, builders and facilities people who hand out repeat contracts. It is tempting to conclude that the second group needs its own social media presence. It does not. Commercial work is won on bids, referrals and being on somebody’s approved-vendor list, but those buyers will still look you up before they call, and what they need to find is not engagement.
How a commercial buyer actually finds you
Ask any contractor where the commercial accounts came from and the answers are consistent: a superintendent who moved firms and brought you with him, another trade on a job site who passed your number along, a bid list you got onto three years ago, or a panicked call because the incumbent did not turn up on a Friday afternoon. None of that starts in a feed, and no amount of posting changes the route.
This is worth saying plainly because it is easy to sell the opposite. A separate commercial content programme is a real cost in time, and for a local trade it almost never returns anything, because the audience is perhaps forty people in your county and you could name most of them.
What they check once they have your name
The looking-up stage is where social media does matter, and the questions being asked are dull ones.
- Are you still trading? A page whose most recent post is from two years ago answers that badly, and it is the first thing a facilities manager notices.
- Are you licensed and insured? They want licence numbers findable, not a phone call to ask for them.
- Can you staff it? Somebody handing out a forty-unit contract needs to believe you have more than two technicians. Photographs of a crew answer that faster than a sentence claiming it.
- Have you done work like this? Rooftop units, three-phase, a commercial water heater bank. One photograph of the right kind of job does more than a paragraph of capability copy.
- Do you answer? A message sent to your page that sits unread for three days has told them what working with you is like.
One account, doing double duty
Keep the single account you already have, aimed at homeowners, and make sure it happens to answer the questions above. A post a fortnight is enough to demonstrate you are trading. Slip a commercial job into the rotation every month or so. Put the licence numbers, the service area and a phone number that a human answers somewhere a stranger can read them in ten seconds.
The reverse strategy, writing posts aimed at property managers on an account read by homeowners, makes the feed worse for everybody. Everything you publish for homeowners also reassures a commercial buyer. Very little of what you would publish for a commercial buyer does anything for a homeowner.
Where social genuinely pays on the commercial side
Staffing, not selling. The limit on how much commercial work a contractor can take is almost always the number of technicians available to do it, and technicians are on social media in a way that facilities managers are not. This is one of the few places where paid social is worth a budget for a trade; the narrow set of cases where it earns its place, recruiting among them, is laid out in our comparison of paid search and paid social.
The organic equivalent costs nothing. Post the apprentice who qualified, the truck you added, the crew on a big job. The people who see it and think “that looks like a decent place to work” are exactly the constraint on your commercial growth.
Frequently asked questions
Should we set up a LinkedIn page for the commercial side?
Set up a profile with correct details so you turn up when someone searches, then leave it. Do not commit to a content programme there unless a specific person has agreed to maintain it, because a page abandoned after six weeks is worse than none.
Do commercial clients read Facebook reviews?
Some glance at them, mostly to confirm you exist and that you respond to complaints. They put far more weight on a reference from someone they know.
Should residential and commercial work go on the same account?
Yes. Splitting them halves the posting frequency on both and doubles the work, for an audience that overlaps more than you would expect.
Is it worth advertising to property managers on social?
Rarely. Targeting job titles inside one county produces an audience too small to deliver sensibly, and you will pay a premium to reach people you could have taken to lunch.
Where to start
Open your own page the way a facilities manager would: no scrolling, ten seconds. Can you find a phone number, a service area, a licence number and evidence somebody posted this month? Fix whichever of those four is missing before you think about anything else.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our social media marketing or book a strategy call.
