A neighbor says “call Dave, he did our deck.” Before she dials, she looks Dave up, and a lot of the time she looks on Facebook. That is most of the case for Facebook marketing for local business. It has little to do with going viral or collecting followers.
We’d treat the page as the place where a referral gets checked, not the place where strangers find you. A page that looks alive turns a recommendation into a call. A page with last July’s holiday graphic on top loses some of those calls, and you never hear about them.
Is Facebook still worth using for a local business?
Yes, and there’s research to check this against, which beats taking our word for it.
Pew Research Center’s Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 found that 71% of U.S. adults say they use Facebook. Only YouTube was higher. Among adults 30 to 49, the age of a lot of homeowners and parents, 80% said they use it.
Those are national numbers, and using Facebook is not the same as hunting for an electrician on it. They do tell you the people who hire roofers and book physical therapy have mostly not left. Much of the “Facebook is dead” talk comes from marketing aimed at teenagers and national brands. Your customers are adults who live a short drive away.
Picture a homeowner in Skippack who hears your name from a neighbor. She opens your page and finds nothing newer than last year, no photos of your work, and a message at the top that nobody answered. She doesn’t call to ask whether you’re still around. She calls the next name on the list.
What your Facebook page is for
For most of our clients it has two jobs, and neither one is reach.
The first is being recognized. A dentist in Newtown whose video gets a million views from strangers in other states has had a nice afternoon and little else. A dentist whose face and office the neighbors see every few weeks is the name they remember when a tooth starts hurting.
The second is passing the check. Are you still in business? Do you do this kind of work? Have you done it for people like me? Current photos of your own jobs answer all three in about ten seconds.
Facebook is not the right main platform for every business. If you’re still choosing, our guide to which social media platform is best for small businesses goes through the options.
What to post, and what to skip
People scroll past polished graphics. They slow down for a face they might know or a kitchen that looks like theirs. We plan around four kinds of post:
- Short phone video of the work and the people doing it. Footage that looks like an ordinary Tuesday is easier to believe than something produced.
- Before and after photos. The cracked driveway and the new one explain your work faster than a paragraph.
- Answers to the questions customers ask every week. If it comes up on the phone, plenty of people are wondering at home.
- The crew, with first names. People like knowing who is about to knock on the door.
We’d skip stock photography and national holiday posts. A stock photo of a smiling family tells a homeowner in Lansdale nothing about you. A “Happy National Donut Day” post tells her you had nothing else to say that day, unless you sell donuts.
Steady beats brilliant here. It’s hardest to keep up in the busy season, when the best material piles up in your camera roll. A plan helps, and our article on using a social media content calendar shows how to build one.
Community groups, Messenger and reviews
Most towns around here have a community group. Someone posts that their water heater died and neighbors answer with names. Those threads decide a fair number of jobs, and the business being named often never sees them.
You can join as a person, read the rules, and answer questions you actually know the answer to. Leave the pitch out, because many groups limit self-promotion and neighbors remember who ignored that. The stronger move is asking happy customers to mention you when the question comes up. Most are glad to and simply never think of it. A neighbor’s word in that thread outweighs anything you could post about yourself.
Messenger is its own channel. Plenty of people would rather type than call, especially during the workday, and they may message two or three businesses and go with whoever sends a useful reply first. Who gets the notification on your page? Is that a phone somebody checks during the day? If we manage your social media, we settle at the start whether we reply or you do, because managing the content doesn’t automatically include every conversation.
Reviews work the same way. BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, a panel of U.S. adults, found that 97% read reviews online. Asked where they had written one in the past year, 45% said Google and 34% said Facebook. Google is the sensible first ask. Facebook is a clear second, and it’s easy to miss if you only ever send the Google link.
When paying for reach makes sense
An unpaid business post reaches some of your followers and few people beyond them. How few varies by page, so plan around the limit and not a number. That’s fine for staying familiar to people who know you. It won’t introduce you to the next town.
Paid reach can, and your own posts show where to spend. If a before and after drew comments and shares from customers, put a modest budget behind that one post and aim it at the towns you serve. Boosting everything you publish is usually a waste. If nothing has drawn a response yet, fix the content before paying to spread it.
A full ad campaign is a bigger decision. What are you offering, to whom, and where does the ad send people? Can you take the work if it goes well? It also carries its own scope and budget, so it isn’t part of a posting package unless we’ve agreed that it is.
Midas of Doylestown is one example of the channels feeding each other. The owner had been inactive on social media and wanted to lower his overall cost per customer. We worked with him to create videos for Facebook and Instagram Reels. His case study reports more referrals from social media, and that his Google Ads cost per lead fell to its lowest point since he started advertising on Google. That is one client’s result, and individual results vary, so it isn’t a promise for another business.
Facebook also won’t rescue a flooded basement call. That person goes to Google, and Facebook’s job is making your name look familiar when they get there. Results build over months of steady posting, and Facebook decides how far any post travels, not us. What we need from you is the material: photos from jobs we weren’t at, news of a new service, and word on which calls turned into good work. You can do all of this yourself with a phone and a plan. Our social media management service covers the planning, writing and publishing once we have your photos and feedback.
Send us your page
This week, text three recent customers and ask each one to mention you the next time someone in the town group asks for a recommendation. It takes about ten minutes and costs nothing.
Then send us the link to your page and tell us which customers you’d like more of. We’ll look at it the way a stranger would and tell you what we’d change, and what we’d need from you. Your first consultation is free.