Social Media for Trades: What Works When You're On Site All Day

Trades have the best raw material on social media. A bathroom that was a disaster on Monday and is finished on Friday. A consumer unit that should have been replaced in 1998. Underfloor heating going in, in one continuous shot, which people will watch to the end for reasons nobody fully understands.

You also have the worst schedule for it. You are on your knees under a sink at eleven, driving to the merchants at two, and quoting a job at six. The advice to "post consistently and engage with your audience" is written by people who have a desk.

So here is a version that survives a real week.

Why it is worth any effort at all

Two reasons, and neither is follower count.

The first is that people check you out before they ring. They have your name from a neighbour, they search it, and they find either a profile showing eight recent jobs or nothing at all. That is the whole conversion. Nobody scrolls your grid for entertainment — they are deciding whether you are real.

The second is price. A trade with visible work, shown properly, stops being compared purely on quote. It is much harder to haggle someone down when you have watched them do the job well fourteen times.

The only four things worth filming

Forget content calendars. There are four shots and they cover almost everything.

• Before and after. The whole reason your trade is watchable. Film the wreck before you touch it — this is the bit everyone forgets, and you cannot go back for it
• The bad thing you found. Perished seals, a fuse board someone has bridged with a nail, a joist cut through for a pipe. People cannot look away and it demonstrates that you notice things
• The thirty-second explainer. "If your radiator is cold at the top, it's air. Here's how to bleed it." Costs you nothing, gets shared locally, makes you the person they call
• The finished job, slowly. One steady pan. No commentary needed

That is the list. You do not need trends, you do not need to dance, and you certainly do not need to be funny on camera if you are not funny in person.

Filming without it becoming a job

The failure is never the filming. It is the editing. Everyone manages to take clips for two weeks, then ends up with four hundred videos in their camera roll and no way through them, and stops.

Rules that actually hold up on site:

• Film vertically. Everything is vertical now. A beautiful landscape clip gets cropped to nothing
• Wipe the lens. Your phone lives in a pocket full of dust. Half of all bad trade footage is a smeared lens
• Ten seconds is plenty. Long clips are harder to use and you will not watch them back
• Say the sentence out loud while filming. "That's the old one out, you can see where it's been leaking behind the plaster." One sentence at the point of filming saves you inventing a caption three days later
• Get permission before you film in someone's home. Every time. A quick "do you mind if I film the before and after, no faces?" is almost always a yes, and the one time it is a no you have avoided a real problem

The honest bit about consistency

You will not post daily. Let's not pretend. What actually works for a trade is a small number, held for a long time. One a week for a year beats five a week for a month, and it is the only pattern anyone has ever sustained alongside a full diary.

If you can manage Friday afternoon — van loaded, job done, ten minutes in the driver's seat — that is a content schedule. It does not need a name.

What it costs to hand over

The entry tier at most agencies runs £300–800 a month, and in Germany there are agencies working specifically with trades starting around €520. At that price you are generally buying graphics and scheduling, not video. Ask directly how many original videos of your own work you get a month. The answer at that tier is often zero, which for a trade is the wrong product entirely — your work is the asset and a stock photo of a spanner is not.

Proper video production with an agency starts closer to £2,000 a month. One German agency publishes the figure plainly: around fifteen short videos a month for about €2,000 if you film the footage yourself. That is a fair rate for the editing work. It is also more than most one- and two-van operations will ever sign off.

The middle option

This is the gap Solara is built for. $29 a month. It texts you a script written for your trade and your area, you film about two minutes on your phone reading off a teleprompter — in the van, on site, wherever you are — and it does the cutting, captions, b-roll, music and posting to Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. You approve everything before it goes out.

The reason it fits trades specifically is that it solves the two problems that actually stop you: not knowing what to say, and the editing. You are not being asked to think of an idea on a Friday. The idea arrives by text and you read it.

It will not answer your DMs or quote your jobs. If what you need is somebody handling enquiries, that is a different purchase.

One last thing

Put your area in your bio and say it out loud in videos. "Gas Safe, covering Leeds and Wakefield." Half the trades accounts that do everything else right forget the one detail that decides whether the person watching can actually hire them.