Start with Facebook. If you serve homeowners in a handful of towns, that’s our answer to what social media platform is best for small businesses. Add Instagram if your work photographs well. Pick one, keep it current, and treat the rest as optional.
That runs against a lot of advice. One person says you need TikTok, another says Facebook is finished, and you still have an Instagram account a relative set up one Thanksgiving. Here is how we’d sort it out.
Social media helps people who already know your name
For most local businesses, social media does one job. A customer mentions you to a friend, the friend searches for you, and what they find either helps that recommendation along or leaves it to stand alone. It supports referrals. It rarely creates demand from nothing.
A profile with recent work keeps your name in front of people who live where you work. They may not need a new patio this month. When they do, a company whose finished jobs they’ve seen a few streets away is easier to call than a stranger.
Posting costs time, not money, and it mostly reaches people who already follow you. Paid ads on Facebook and Instagram are a different job with their own budget. Our PPC advertising guide for small businesses explains how they compare with advertising on Google.
Match the platform to how your customers buy
Let’s say you own a septic company in Skippack. A homeowner with a backed-up tank searches, picks a company and calls. She won’t scroll your Instagram first. Now take a tile installer in Bethlehem. Someone planning a bathroom may look at finished bathrooms for months before speaking to anyone. Social media matters far more to the second business than the first.
So ask yourself a few things. What kind of work do you want more of? Who buys it? Do they decide in an afternoon or over a season? Age counts too. Pew’s 2025 survey found Instagram use far higher among adults under 30 than among those 65 and older. If most of your customers are retired homeowners, weigh that.
Then look at what your work produces. A paving company finishing a driveway gets before and after photos every week, without trying. A physical therapy clinic has no picture of a recovered shoulder, but it has dozens of questions people ask, like which stretches help a stiff lower back. Photos suit Instagram and Pinterest. Short answers on camera suit video platforms, and that only works if someone at the business is willing to appear on camera and keep doing it.
What social media platform is best for small businesses?
For local homeowners, we’d rank them like this.
Facebook. It has the broadest adult audience of the four. According to Pew Research Center’s Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 report, 71% of U.S. adults say they use Facebook, 50% use Instagram and 37% use TikTok. That’s a national survey of 5,022 adults. It describes Americans in general and can’t tell you what your customers in Hatfield do.
Local groups on Facebook are also where neighbors ask each other who to hire. The drawback is reach. In our experience, unpaid posts from a business page reach fewer people than owners expect, so Facebook is often paired with a small ad budget.
Instagram. It’s built around photos and short video, so it suits work that looks good finished. Stories and Reels let you show a job in progress. It asks for a steady supply of good pictures, and if nobody remembers to take them, the account goes quiet fast.
Pinterest. People collect ideas here for projects they’re planning. The Pew Research Center social media fact sheet puts it at 36% of U.S. adults, and that figure is from the 2024 survey, the latest it lists. Pins can be found long after they’re posted. The audience isn’t local by default, though, so for a company serving one county it’s an extra, not the main effort.
TikTok. Many people use it to look things up. In Adobe Express’s 2026 survey on TikTok as a search engine, 49% of consumers said they had used it that way, up from 41% in its 2024 survey. The sample was 807 U.S. consumers and leaned toward millennials, so read it as a direction. TikTok also shows videos to people far outside your area, which matters little if you work in three townships.
If you sell to other businesses, like a commercial cleaning company, LinkedIn may be where your buyers are.
Check the local basics before you open an account
Your Google Business Profile isn’t social media, but it comes first. Name, address, phone, hours and services should be right there and on listings like Yelp. We often find a business has moved, changed its hours or added a service without the information catching up.
Then look at competitors. Which platforms are the businesses like yours active on? More to the point, where do their posts get comments and questions from people who look like local customers? Likes from other people in the trade don’t tell you much.
On whatever you choose, name the towns you work in. A post that says where the job was helps nearby people see that you serve them.
What social media won’t do, and what we need from you
Nobody outside the platforms controls how they decide which posts to show, and they change that regularly. So we can’t tell you that posting will produce a set number of calls. A well-kept profile gives people who’ve heard about you something recent to judge you on, and that builds slowly.
It only works if it’s kept up. A content calendar that a busy owner can stick with makes that easier. If someone else does the posting, your part doesn’t disappear. With our social media management service we plan the content and handle the agreed writing, design, scheduling and publishing. We still need your photos, news about new services, and your word on which inquiries turned out to be good ones.
Ask your next customers where they heard of you
This week, start asking every customer at the end of the job where they first came across you. It takes a minute per job and costs nothing, and you can keep it up for a month. A few weeks of answers will tell you more about your market than this article, or any general guide, can.
Then tell us what you’re posting now, which platforms you’ve tried and what kind of work you want more of. We’ll look at what’s in place and tell you what we’d keep, what we’d drop and why. Your first consultation is free. You can contact us here or call (215) 368-8900.