Look, I’ll save you the suspense: yes, Facebook and Instagram can bring in real work for a Melbourne tradie, but almost never the way the “grow your following” crowd promises. I’ve run paid campaigns for chippies, landscapers & renovators across the east and the bayside suburbs for a good while now, and the pattern is boringly consistent. The ones who treat social like a portfolio and a reputation engine get phone calls. The ones chasing likes get a sore thumb and not much else.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. A page with 4,000 followers and no phone number in the bio will lose to a page with 300 followers, a pinned album of before-and-afters, and a recent review that says “turned up when he said he would.” Social media doesn’t sell the job for you. It quietly removes the reasons a stranger won’t call you.
So before you boost a single post, it’s worth being honest about what these platforms actually do for a trade business, and what they don’t. I’ll be blunt about both.
What Facebook and Instagram actually do for a trade
They’re a shopfront, not a lead firehose. When someone gets your name off a mate, or spots your van parked along Geelong Road, the first thing a decent chunk of them do is look you up. They’re not deciding to hire you on Instagram. They’re deciding whether you’re legit enough to text.
That’s the whole game. Your feed answers three silent questions: is this person real, do they do work like mine, and has anyone regretted hiring them. Get those three right and the platform has done its job. Everything else is noise dressed up as strategy.
I’d go further, and this is where I lose people at barbecues: for most trades, the single most valuable thing on your profile isn’t any post you’ve ever made. It’s the reviews tab and a bio that a 55-year-old homeowner can actually tap to call. That’s it. The rest is supporting cast.
The stuff that genuinely brings in work
Before-and-afters. Every time. A landscaper out in Bayside who posts a tired nature strip on Monday and a finished paved courtyard on Friday is doing more selling in two photos than any caption ever will. Homeowners can’t picture the finished thing in their own yard; your job is to picture it for them, on a house that looks a bit like theirs.
Reviews and tagged jobs matter nearly as much. When a happy customer in Northcote tags you in a post about their new deck, that carries weight your own marketing never will, because it isn’t yours. Screenshot the good ones, reply to all of them, & pin the best to the top of the page.
Local community groups are the quiet workhorse. The suburb buy/swap/sell and “recommend a tradie” groups for places like Thornbury or Bentleigh generate a steady trickle of jobs, and it costs nothing but the time to answer honestly instead of spamming. People ask “who’s good for tiling near me” every single day in those groups. Be the name that gets tagged.
Then there’s retargeting, which is the one paid tactic I’ll defend to anyone. Showing a simple before-and-after ad to people who already visited your website, or watched one of your videos, is cheap and it converts, because you’re talking to warm hands rather than strangers. If you’re going to spend, spend there first. We go deeper on the mechanics in our piece on running Facebook ads that actually get replies, and the same logic holds whether you’re chasing customers or trying to hire another set of hands.
The vanity metrics that don’t pay a single invoice
Follower count is meaningless. I’ll say it plainly because someone has to: a booked job is the only metric that keeps the ute on the road. Ten thousand followers who’ll never hire you are worth less than one bloke in Sandringham who needs his bathroom retiled next month. I’ve watched tradies get genuinely chuffed about “reach” numbers on a boosted post while their phone sat dead silent all week. Reach isn’t revenue.
Likes, shares, “engagement rate”, follower growth graphs. None of it shows up in the bank. The platforms report on those numbers because they’re easy to move and they keep you posting. Fair enough, that’s their business. It doesn’t have to be yours. The only dashboard I care about for a trade is: how many enquiries did the profile send this month, and how many turned into a quote.
If a marketer is showing you engagement charts and never mentions a booked job, be careful with that claim. Ask them to connect the post to the phone ringing. If they can’t, you’re paying for a hobby.
Organic versus paid: where the money should go
Organic posting is free, but it’s slow and the reach is thin. Facebook shows your posts to a fraction of your own followers unless you pay, and that fraction has been shrinking for years. So if your whole plan is “post three times a week and wait”, expect a long, quiet wait.
Paid is faster but it punishes lazy setup. A boosted post with no targeting, no offer and a blurry photo just sets money on fire in front of a wider audience. Done properly, though, a small local budget aimed at the right postcodes with a strong before-and-after can pay for itself several times over. The government’s own guidance on getting your business online is a sensible, jargon-free starting point if you want the basics before you spend anything.
My honest split for a working tradie: keep organic simple and cheap, and put the real money behind retargeting and tightly targeted local ads. Chasing viral reach is a mug’s game for a business that only services one side of the city anyway. And once the enquiries start coming, the bottleneck stops being marketing and becomes admin, which is a whole other conversation we’ve had in our notes on automating the boring parts of a trade business.
Which trades win on social, and which should back Google instead
Visual, considered work cleans up on Instagram and Facebook. Renovations, landscaping, tiling, decking, concreting, cabinetry, painting. Anything where the customer is planning ahead, comparing options and wants to see the finished result before committing real money. These jobs live and die on the strength of your before-and-afters, so social is a genuine channel worth the effort.
The trades where Google beats social every time
Emergency and urgent work is a different animal. Burst pipe at 11pm, no hot water, blocked drain, locked out, sparks coming from a powerpoint. Nobody scrolls Instagram looking for an emergency plumber. They type it straight into Google and ring the first three results. For those trades, being visible in local search will out-earn any amount of Facebook posting, and I’d rather see that budget go into showing up on the map. If that’s your world, start with our rundown on winning local search in your suburb before you touch social at all.
Plenty of trades sit in the middle and want both, which is fine. The mistake is picking the channel that suits your ego instead of the one that suits how your customers actually go looking. A general steer on balancing the two lives in our overview of marketing for local businesses.
How much time this really takes
Less than the gurus imply, more than you’d like. Realistically, if you or someone on the tools takes a decent before-and-after photo on every job and posts it a couple of times a week, replies to comments and reviews, and keeps half an eye on the local groups, you’re looking at maybe twenty to thirty minutes a day. That’s it. You don’t need reels, you don’t need trending audio, and you certainly don’t need a content calendar with themes.
The trap is treating it like a second job. I’ve seen good tradies burn a Saturday arvo editing a video that got nine views and no calls, when a single clear photo of the finished job posted from the driveway would’ve done more. Its the difference between doing the work and performing the work. Keep it dead simple and sustainable, because the fancy version always gets dropped by week three anyway.
If you genuinely can’t spare the twenty minutes, that’s a real answer too. Either pay someone to run it properly or don’t run it at all. Half-arsed social, posted once a month with a stock photo, does nothing for you and quietly signals that the business might be a bit half-arsed too.
So is it worth your time?
For the visual trades, yes, provided you measure the right thing. Post the work, farm the reviews, get tagged in the local groups, put a small paid budget behind retargeting, & judge the whole lot on one number: jobs booked. Ignore the follower count. It has never once fixed a leaking roof or paid a subbie.
For emergency and urgent trades, spend that energy on Google first and treat social as a nice-to-have. There’s no shame in that. Play to how your customers actually search, not how the internet says you should look. The wider business.gov.au resources are a solid, neutral place to sanity-check any of this against your own numbers.
If you’d rather have someone who does this every day take a look at where your work actually comes from, that’s literally the job. Have a chat with our team at Growth Factory and we’ll tell you straight whether social is worth your effort or whether your budget belongs somewhere else entirely.
— Dane Corcoran, Paid Media Lead at Growth Factory