For plumbers
Social media for a plumber, in a market that has Gas Safe in it
There are 76,630 Gas Safe registered businesses in the UK and almost everything ranking on this subject is American field-service software writing about HVAC. It is well written and nearly none of it applies to you. This does.
01 · Plan the year
The year, and why October decides it
Plumbing is the most seasonal trade on this list and the seasonality is not evenly rewarded. The money is decided in a six-week window in the autumn, and almost everything worth posting is worth posting a month before the thing it is about.
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Boiler service season, September and October
The whole year's servicing revenue is decided before the first cold snap. Once the heating is on and working, nobody thinks about it again until it fails.
Post From the last week of August. This is the highest-value fortnight of posting you will do all year.
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The first cold night, usually mid to late October
The phone rings for a week. The people who call you are the ones who remembered a name.
Post Before it, not during. "Turn your heating on for ten minutes this weekend and see what happens" is the single most useful post in the trade.
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Landlord Gas Safety Records, all year but clustered
An annual legal obligation with a fixed anniversary, which makes it the most reliably recurring work you have.
Post Monthly, aimed squarely at landlords and letting agents. It is a different audience from homeowners and it deserves its own posts.
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Christmas and the two weeks after
Full houses, guest bathrooms, and everybody's heating running twice as hard. Emergency demand peaks and so do your rates.
Post Mid-December, saying plainly what you cover and when. People do not know who is working on the 28th.
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The first hard frost, typically January
Frozen and burst pipes. By the time it happens nobody is reading; they are calling whoever answers.
Post Write it in November. Where pipes freeze, how to thaw one safely, when to stop and where the stopcock is.
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Bathroom season, February to April
The highest-value domestic job you do, and it is planned in the quiet months rather than bought on impulse.
Post From January, as process rather than as result — people want to see how disruptive five days actually is.
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Summer, June to August
The quiet quarter, which is when the boiler replacements nobody wants to do in December should be sold.
Post Throughout. "Replace it in July at a time that suits you" is an easier sell than anything you will say in November.
How to actually do the planning
- Accept that October is worth three times June and weight the effort accordingly. Most plumbers post evenly and then wonder why the autumn was quiet.
- Write the winter content in November, when you still have evenings. Nobody has time to be clear about frozen pipes during the week the pipes freeze.
- Split your posts by audience: homeowner, landlord, letting agent. They want different things and the landlord posts are the ones that turn into repeat annual work.
02 · What to post
Eight things you could photograph this week
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Your Gas Safe number, on the van
Once a month, plainly. It is the single strongest trust signal in the UK trade and the one no American guide mentions.
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The bathroom, day one to day five
Five photographs, one a day. Bathroom fits are the highest-value domestic job you do and people want to see the process, not the result.
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What a boiler service actually includes
The list. Most people think it is a glance and a sticker, which is exactly why they skip it.
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The frozen pipe, in January
Where they freeze, how to thaw one safely, when to stop and call. Post it in December, before it happens.
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The part that failed
A corroded diverter valve in your hand. Nothing explains a bill better than the object that caused it.
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Old boiler, new boiler, running cost
Efficiency in pounds a year rather than percentages. It is the only version of that number anyone acts on.
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Where the stopcock is
Tell people to find theirs today. Genuinely useful, gets shared, and the person who finds it thinks of you when it matters.
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The emergency you got to in an hour
With the time stamp. Response time is what people are actually buying at two in the morning.
03 · How often
How often, realistically
Two a week, and let them be short. A photograph and two honest sentences beats a paragraph you did not have time to write.
Weight the calendar. October and November are worth twice the effort of June because that is when boilers are tested and found wanting.
Write the January content in November. Nobody has time to be clever about frozen pipes during the week the pipes freeze.
04 · Take a better photograph
How to photograph a job in a cupboard
Your work happens in airing cupboards, under sinks and behind bath panels — the three worst-lit places in a British house. That is a real problem and it has real solutions, none of which cost anything. The pair below is the same boiler install, five minutes apart.
Illustrative examples, generated rather than photographed in a real business.
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Do not use the flash
The phone flash sits next to the lens, so it throws light straight down the barrel and back off every chrome and white surface in front of you. On a boiler that means a white blowout in the middle and black everywhere else. Turn it off and leave it off. Open the cupboard door, open the room door behind you, pull the curtain, and shoot with whatever daylight is in the room.
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Light it with the torch you already have
If there is genuinely no daylight, use a second phone as a torch — the client will hold one, or stand it on a shelf — and put it to the SIDE of the subject, about a metre away, not next to your camera. Light coming from the side reveals shape and pipework; light coming from the camera flattens everything into a white wall.
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Square to the wall
Boilers, boards and bathroom fits are made of straight lines, and straight lines shot at an angle look wrong even to people who cannot say why. Stand square on and hold the phone flat against the plane of the wall. This is the difference between a photograph of a boiler and a photograph of your workmanship.
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Clear the floor
Offcuts, the toolbag, the old unit, a dust sheet. Thirty seconds of moving things out of frame, and it is the whole difference between "finished" and "nearly finished". People buy tidiness in this trade — it is the proxy for everything they cannot assess.
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Take the before, every time
The single most valuable photograph a plumber can take is of the thing that was there when you arrived, and it is the one nobody remembers, because at that point you are thinking about the job. Make it the first thing you do after you take your boots off.
05 · The UK part
The British specifics
- Gas Safe registration is a legal requirement for gas work in the UK and the number is checkable on the register. Publishing it is the trust move, and the American pages ranking today do not know it exists.
- Combi boilers dominate UK housing stock in a way they do not in the US, so American content about furnaces and ductwork is not just unhelpful — it is about a different machine.
- Landlord Gas Safety Records are an annual legal obligation. That is a recurring, date-driven, searchable market sitting there, and it is the closest thing to a subscription that this trade has.
- Hard water across much of the south and east genuinely shortens appliance life. It is a regional argument for scale reduction that no national page can make and no American one would think to.
- The heating season is the business. The first cold snap, usually October, is when the year is decided — which means August and September are when the posting has to happen.
06 · Mistakes
What not to do
- Photographs of a wrench on a white background. It says nothing, and there is a real photograph of real work in your phone from this morning.
- "Call for a free quote" with no indication of price. Ranges and the factors that move them convert better and waste fewer of your evenings.
- Only posting emergencies. It positions you as the person people call when it has already gone wrong, rather than the person who services the boiler every year.
07 · And then, us
And then, the part we do
Everything above works with no product and no subscription. This is the pitch, and all three start from that one install photograph. Nothing was shot twice. The difference between them is how far you let the assistant go.
Layout Pro
The words and the panels go on top. The photograph underneath is exactly the one you took.
The trust post. The number, and a reason to care about it.
Visual Artist
Your subject is kept as it is, and the setting around it is replaced.
The seasonal post. Same install, somewhere you can actually see it.
Image Maestro
Your subject is locked, then a new scene is built around it from a different angle.
The landlord post. A different audience, and the repeat work.
Illustrative examples, generated rather than photographed in a real business.
One post, whichever you pick.
Where it stops being three posts and starts being a campaign
The autumn is the whole year for a heating engineer and it is six weeks long. A campaign is that six weeks written once: the late-August service post, the mid-September one about what a service actually includes, the early-October "turn it on this weekend and see" one, and the late-October emergency-cover post — dated, queued, and going out while you are up a ladder with no signal. That is the version that gets built and then never gets done by hand.
Or let it write them for you.
SocialPostxr takes a photo and a line about your business and gives you three finished posts to pick from. The free plan needs no card.
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