--- title: "The contractor social media playbook: 30, 60 and 90 days" description: "A 30/60/90 operating plan for contractor social media: what to set up, who owns capture and approval, the weekly rhythm, and the two numbers worth watching." canonical_url: "https://bolta.ai/for/contractors/playbook" markdown_url: "https://bolta.ai/for/contractors/playbook.md" last_updated: "2026-07-28" content_type: "industry" publisher: "Bolta" --- # The contractor social media playbook: 30, 60 and 90 days Source: https://bolta.ai/for/contractors/playbook Last updated: 2026-07-28 A 30/60/90 operating plan for contractor social media: what to set up, who owns capture and approval, the weekly rhythm, and the two numbers worth watching. ## Summary This is an operating plan, not a marketing theory. It assumes you have jobs to run, one person with limited time, and no appetite for a channel that quietly dies in month two. ## Who this is for - Contractors ## Core capabilities - Confirm the customer agreed to their property being posted: A house is identifiable. Get agreement at closeout, keep the house number and any distinguishing detail out of the frame and the caption, and honour a later request to take it down the same day. If you cannot remember whether they said yes, the answer is no. - Check every factual claim in the draft: Materials, measurements, timelines, warranty terms, licensing and insurance statements. Each of these has an owner — the lead on the job for what was actually installed, the office for what you carry. Check with the owner rather than from memory, and do it at approval so it happens once. - Treat any price in a post as an offer: If a number appears, decide whether you would honour it if a homeowner called quoting it back. If not, take it out or attach the conditions. Ranges with conditions are safe; a single number without them is not. - Check consent for every face: Crew, customers and anyone in the background. If someone is identifiable and has not agreed, get the agreement or pick a different frame. Keep a simple note of which crew members have said yes so you are not re-asking the same person weekly. - Read it as a homeowner who has never met you: The most common failure in contractor posts is assumed knowledge. Would someone outside the trade understand what the problem was, what you did, and whether you cover their area? If not, add the missing sentence before approving. - Check the photo matches the caption: Wrong job, wrong stage, a shot from a different season. Scheduled queues drift, and a mismatch reads as carelessness to exactly the audience judging whether you are careful. Check the pairing at approval, not at publish. - Check the timing against the actual schedule: Weather, closures, a job that slipped, a holiday week. A scheduled post promoting availability you no longer have — or worse, celebrating a job that is now in dispute — is the most avoidable own goal in contractor social media. - Pause the queue when something goes wrong: A storm, an accident on a site, a local incident, a complaint gaining traction. One person should have the authority to pause everything scheduled and know how to do it. Cheerful scheduled content during a bad moment is worse than silence. ## Limitations and boundaries - This page is general and educational. It is not legal, financial, medical, or regulatory advice for contractors. - Generated content can be incorrect and should be reviewed before publication. - Availability depends on the current Bolta plan, connected network, account permissions, and integration coverage. - Current prices and plan limits must be verified on the Bolta pricing page. Contractor social media plans fail in the same place every time: week five. The first burst of enthusiasm is gone, the busy season has started, and the account goes quiet without anyone deciding to stop. The fix is structural rather than motivational. Split capture from approval and make them two different people. Set a cadence low enough to survive your worst week. Pick two numbers and ignore everything else. Then leave it alone for ninety days, because thirty days of contractor social data is noise and the buying cycle for a roof is longer than that anyway. What follows works with or without software. If you are running Bolta the drafting and scheduling collapse into an approval queue, but the ownership decisions and the weekly rhythm are still yours. ## Days 1-30: set it up so it cannot quietly stop The first month is about removing every reason the system could break. Do not chase growth yet. Pick platforms honestly. For almost every residential trade that is Facebook plus Instagram, and nothing else. Facebook is where local groups, neighbours and the fifty-plus homeowner are; Instagram is where the before-and-afters read best. Two platforms done properly beats five neglected ones, and a seven-platform launch is the single most reliable predictor that a contractor account will be dead by March. Fix the profile before you post anything. Service area, trades you actually take, phone number that a person answers, hours, and a link that goes to a page rather than a dead site. Half of contractor social traffic is someone checking whether you are real and still operating; make that check pass in five seconds. Split the two jobs. Capture belongs to whoever is on site — a lead, a foreman, or you. Three photos a day into a shared album, from consistent angles. Approval belongs to the owner or whoever can say no to a price, a claim, or a customer's house appearing in a photo. Never assign both to the same overworked person, because the day they get busy you lose the entire channel at once. Write the voice down in five lines. How you talk, what you never say, whether you use exclamation marks, how you refer to customers, and what the account does not comment on. It is short on purpose. If you are running Bolta this is exactly what the agents work from, and it is the difference between a usable first draft and a generic one. Set the cadence at two posts a week and hold it there for the full month, even if one does well. ## Days 31-60: build the rhythm and start answering people Month two is about the loop rather than the output. By now you know which capture habit stuck and which one you invented on day one and never did once. Move to a fixed fifteen-minute slot every week — a Friday afternoon or a rained-out morning, not a Monday. Three things happen in it: look at what went out, approve the next fortnight's queue, and note what is coming up that needs a post. That meeting is the entire management overhead of the channel. Start treating replies as part of the job. Comments and messages on a contractor page are almost always people asking whether you do their trade, whether you cover their area, or what something costs. Answering within a day is worth more than any post, and it should not go to the person on the roof — put it with whoever answers the office phone, because they already answer these exact questions. Get the second platform running properly. In month one it was enough that it existed; in month two it should get content shaped for it rather than a copy of the Facebook post. This is also the month to read your own edits. If you rewrite the same thing every time — cutting hype, adding the material, changing how you describe a repair — that is a voice rule you have not written down. Add it to the five-line document. In Bolta those edits also feed the voice model directly, so the pattern gets absorbed instead of repeated. ## Days 61-90: measure two things and decide Ninety days is the first honest read. Judge it on two numbers and let the rest go. The first is saves, shares and comments — not likes. On a contractor page a share is a neighbour recommending you inside a local group, which is the single highest-value thing that can happen. A save is someone filing you for a job they have not started. Likes are ambient. If shares are climbing month over month, the content is working even if follower count is flat. The second is inbound: page messages, calls that mention a post, and estimate requests that arrive without a referral name attached. Ask whoever books estimates to note when someone says they saw the page. It is unscientific and it is the most useful signal you will get. Then decide one of three things. If both numbers are rising, keep the cadence and improve the photography, which is usually the biggest remaining lever — consistent angles and daylight beat everything else. If shares are flat, the posts are probably announcements rather than specifics; check whether every post names a concrete thing. If the account is not being fed at all, the problem is capture ownership, not content, and the fix is moving it to someone whose day allows it. What you should not do at ninety days is start over. Contractor pages compound slowly, and the companies that win are the ones still posting twice a week in month nine — largely because their competitors were not. ## Human review checklist - **Confirm the customer agreed to their property being posted** — A house is identifiable. Get agreement at closeout, keep the house number and any distinguishing detail out of the frame and the caption, and honour a later request to take it down the same day. If you cannot remember whether they said yes, the answer is no. - **Check every factual claim in the draft** — Materials, measurements, timelines, warranty terms, licensing and insurance statements. Each of these has an owner — the lead on the job for what was actually installed, the office for what you carry. Check with the owner rather than from memory, and do it at approval so it happens once. - **Treat any price in a post as an offer** — If a number appears, decide whether you would honour it if a homeowner called quoting it back. If not, take it out or attach the conditions. Ranges with conditions are safe; a single number without them is not. - **Check consent for every face** — Crew, customers and anyone in the background. If someone is identifiable and has not agreed, get the agreement or pick a different frame. Keep a simple note of which crew members have said yes so you are not re-asking the same person weekly. - **Read it as a homeowner who has never met you** — The most common failure in contractor posts is assumed knowledge. Would someone outside the trade understand what the problem was, what you did, and whether you cover their area? If not, add the missing sentence before approving. - **Check the photo matches the caption** — Wrong job, wrong stage, a shot from a different season. Scheduled queues drift, and a mismatch reads as carelessness to exactly the audience judging whether you are careful. Check the pairing at approval, not at publish. - **Check the timing against the actual schedule** — Weather, closures, a job that slipped, a holiday week. A scheduled post promoting availability you no longer have — or worse, celebrating a job that is now in dispute — is the most avoidable own goal in contractor social media. - **Pause the queue when something goes wrong** — A storm, an accident on a site, a local incident, a complaint gaining traction. One person should have the authority to pause everything scheduled and know how to do it. Cheerful scheduled content during a bad moment is worse than silence. ## Who should run social media for a contracting business? Split it. Capture — photos from the job — belongs to whoever is on site, usually a lead or foreman. Approval belongs to the owner or whoever can say no to a price, a claim or a customer's house appearing publicly. Assigning both to one busy person is why most contractor pages go quiet by month two. ## How long before contractor social media brings in leads? Plan on ninety days before judging it, and expect the first results to be shares inside local groups rather than direct calls. The buying cycle for a roof, a fence or a remodel is long, and much of the value is a homeowner who followed in spring and calls in autumn. Set a cadence you can hold for nine months. ## What should a contractor measure on social media? Shares and saves first, because a share is a neighbour recommending you inside a local group and that is the highest-value event available to a local trade. Second, inbound: page messages and estimate requests that mention a post. Follower count and likes are the least useful numbers. Have whoever books estimates ask how people found you. ## Should we pause posting after a bad review or a storm? Yes, and decide in advance who can do it. Cheerful scheduled content during a local incident or an active complaint reads badly and is hard to undo. Name one person with authority to pause the queue, make sure they know how, and treat resuming as a separate decision once the situation is clear. ## How does Bolta fit into a contractor social media plan? It replaces the drafting and scheduling steps, not the ownership decisions. The agents write and queue posts from your job photos and context; your approver clears the queue in a couple of minutes from the truck. The capture habit, the weekly slot and the two numbers you watch stay exactly as described here. ## Relevant links - [Social media for contractors, drafted by AI and approved by you](https://bolta.ai/for/contractors) - [LinkedIn for contractors: commercial work, hiring and suppliers](https://bolta.ai/for/contractors/linkedin) - [Content ideas for contractors you can shoot on the job](https://bolta.ai/for/contractors/content-ideas) - [Contractor social media examples, rewritten before and after](https://bolta.ai/for/contractors/examples) - [Related page: /for](https://bolta.ai/for) - [Bolta pricing](https://bolta.ai/pricing)