Trades
Is social media actually worth it for a trades business?
Most contractors we talk to in Edmonton say a version of the same thing. The work comes from referrals, it always has, and the feed feels like something for restaurants and clothing brands. That is a reasonable read of it. It is also the reason the trades that do post pull ahead so quickly, because the bar is on the floor.
What a referral actually is
A referral is one person telling another person that you are safe to let into their house. That is the whole transaction. The reason it works so well is trust transfer, not advertising.
Posting is the same transaction, running continuously and without needing anyone to remember you at the exact right moment. Someone watches you rebuild a rotten deck frame, sees that you found the problem and explained it, and forms an opinion about whether you are safe to let into their house. Six months later their own deck goes soft and you are already the answer.
The difference is timing. A referral only works if your name comes up in the week somebody has a problem. A feed works on people who do not have the problem yet.
The competitor test
Look up three contractors in your trade within your service area. Most of them will have a page that was set up once, has a logo, a phone number, four photos from 2023 and nothing since. That is the market you are competing in.
This is why the trades are still one of the easiest categories to stand out in. You are not competing with a marketing department. You are competing with people who are as busy as you are and who also decided it was not worth it.
What actually gets watched
Finished work performs worse than most contractors expect. A perfect bathroom is a photo, and a photo is easy to scroll past. What holds attention is the part the homeowner never gets to see.
The tear out. The thing behind the wall that explains why the quote changed. The reason you did it the harder way. The five seconds where the level shows dead centre. Homeowners are not watching to admire the tile. They are watching to work out whether you are the kind of person who does it properly when nobody is looking.
That is also, not coincidentally, exactly what a referral communicates.
The honest catch
The reason this does not happen is not that contractors do not believe it. It is that you are on a roof at seven in the morning and filming is not going to beat finishing the job. Every trade we work with tried doing it themselves first and stopped within a month, because it is a second job.
That is the actual problem worth solving. Not whether posting works, but who does it when your day is already full. A retainer exists because filming in a batch on one job is the only version of this that survives a busy fortnight.
Where it connects to getting found
Posting builds recognition. It does not, on its own, put you in front of somebody typing your trade plus your city into Google at the moment they need it. That is a different job, and for local trades it is usually the Google Business Profile doing the heavy lifting.
The two work together. Search catches people who already have the problem. Posting decides whether they recognise your name when they see it in the results.
Common questions
Do contractors really need social media?
Not to survive, but to stop depending on referrals arriving at the right moment. A contractor with an active feed is being seen by people who are not ready to hire yet, so when they are ready, the first name they think of is already yours. Referrals still do the closing. Social media widens the pool the referrals come from.
Which platform should a contractor be on?
Instagram and Facebook first for most trades in Alberta, because that is where homeowners are and where local sharing happens. TikTok rewards good job site footage and reaches younger homeowners. YouTube matters last for most trades, but it is where longer explanation videos live if you want them.
What if my work is not visual?
Almost all trade work is more visual than the person doing it thinks, because you stopped noticing it years ago. A panel change, a clean solder joint, a level deck frame, a torn out floor that reveals the real problem underneath. Homeowners have never seen any of that. Familiarity is not the same as boring.
How long before posting brings in work?
Longer than anyone selling you marketing wants to admit, and it depends on how often you post and how competitive your trade is locally. What happens first is not phone calls. It is people mentioning they have seen you, which is the same signal arriving earlier.