Facebook, Instagram or TikTok for Tradies?
You can't run five accounts and stay on the tools. Here's what each platform is genuinely good at for a trade business, what it costs you in effort, and how to pick the one to commit to.
The advice tradies usually get is to be everywhere. That's advice for a business with a marketing person, not for someone who's quoting at 8pm. One account, kept up properly, beats five abandoned ones — so the useful question isn't which platform is biggest, it's which one suits the work you do, the clients you want and the time you actually have. This guide compares them on those terms.
Doing this job for a living? See job management in ServiceYak.
Pick one, and pick it on purpose
Every platform will reward consistent posting and punish stopping. Since consistency is the scarce resource, the choice comes down to three questions:
- Is your work worth looking at? Landscaping, renovation, joinery, tiling and restoration photograph well. Switchboards, drains and ductwork mostly don't, though a tidy install still beats a mess.
- Who are you trying to reach? Homeowners, builders, property managers and commercial clients aren't in the same places or in the same frame of mind.
- How much time have you actually got? Photos are a couple of minutes a job. Video is an order of magnitude more work, and pretending otherwise is why so many trade accounts stop after three posts.
Platforms change constantly — what they favour, what features they offer and who's on them. Treat everything below as a starting point and then check the simplest thing of all: where do the clients you want actually spend their time? Ask a few of them.
What each one is good for
| Platform | Best for | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Local reach, community groups, older and family homeowner audiences. Doubles as a basic web presence and a review destination | Low. Photos and a sentence. The local buy-swap-sell and community groups are where a lot of trade referrals still happen | |
| Visual trades selling to homeowners — landscaping, carpentry, tiling, renovation, pools, painting | Low to moderate. It demands decent photos, which means caring about light and tidiness | |
| TikTok | Reach well beyond your suburb, and a young audience. Strong for explaining and for satisfying process footage | High. Video, filmed and edited, consistently. Only worth it if you enjoy making it |
| YouTube | Long-form explaining. Builds real authority and the videos keep working for years | Very high per video. A serious project rather than a marketing task |
| Commercial and B2B work — builders, developers, facilities managers, strata. Also recruitment | Low, but the content is different: projects, capability, hiring, not finished bathrooms |
Notice that the two cheapest to run — Facebook and Instagram — cover most of what a residential trade business needs. The expensive ones are worth it only if you're genuinely interested in making the content, because that's the only thing that will keep you doing it.
A starting point by trade
- Landscapers, carpenters, tilers, painters, renovation builders — Instagram, with the portfolio as the point. This is the group that gets real enquiries from social.
- Plumbers, electricians, HVAC — Facebook, mainly for local presence, community groups and reviews. Keep expectations modest; your Google Business Profile is doing the real work.
- Builders doing commercial or working with developers — LinkedIn, plus a portfolio somewhere visual for the domestic side.
- Anyone who genuinely enjoys being on camera — video, on whichever platform you'll keep making it for. The enjoyment is the deciding factor, not the reach.
- Anyone with a good local reputation and no time — one platform, one post a week, and put the saved hours into your Google Business Profile and asking for reviews.
Setting the account up properly
Whichever one you choose, half its value comes from the profile itself rather than the posts, because that's what a person checking you out actually reads.
- Use a business account, not a personal one. It separates the business from your own profile, gives you the stats and unlocks the advertising tools if you ever want them.
- Get the name and handle right. Match your trading name and keep it identical across platforms and your Google Business Profile. If the exact name is taken, shorten rather than adding numbers.
- Say the trade and the area in the bio. Licensed plumber, southern suburbs, and a phone number. That single line answers what most visitors came to find out.
- Link somewhere useful. Your website, or your enquiry page, or your Google listing if that's all you have. A profile with no route to contacting you is a dead end.
- Fill it before you promote it. Ten or twelve posts of real work before you tell anyone about it. An empty account is worse than none, because it makes the business look like it stopped.
When to add a second one
Once the first account has been running for six months without you dreading it, adding a second is cheap — most posts can go to both with minor changes. Before that, resist it.
- Add a second when the first is genuinely habitual, not when someone tells you that you should be on it.
- Reuse rather than recreate. The same job photos and the same sentence work on more than one platform.
- Keep the profile details identical everywhere — same name, same number, same suburbs.
- Drop one if it's dead. A platform that's produced nothing after a year of honest effort is telling you something. Better to run one well.
ServiceYak keeps job photos and notes filed against the job, so whatever platform you settle on, the material for the next post is sitting in your job history rather than somewhere in a camera roll.
Frequently asked questions
Which social media platform is best for tradies?
It depends on your trade and your clients. Visual trades selling to homeowners — landscaping, carpentry, tiling, painting — do best on Instagram. Service trades like plumbing, electrical and HVAC get more out of Facebook, mainly for local presence and community groups. Commercial and builder-facing businesses should look at LinkedIn.
Should I be on more than one platform?
Not at first. One account kept up for a year beats three that stopped after a month, and consistency is the thing in shortest supply when you're on the tools. Add a second only once the first is habitual, and reuse the same photos and captions rather than making new content for it.
Is TikTok worth it for a trade business?
Only if you enjoy making video. It can reach well beyond your service area and works for explaining and for process footage, but it demands filming and editing consistently — which is far more work than photos. If video isn't something you'd do for fun, the effort is better spent elsewhere.
Do I need social media at all if I have a Google Business Profile?
You can run a perfectly good trade business without it. The profile is where people search and where your reviews live, so it's the priority by a distance. Social is worth adding when you want a portfolio a referred client can browse — which matters much more in the visual trades than in the service ones.