What should a local business post on Instagram?

Post the work, the people doing it, and the answers to the questions you get asked on the phone all day. Those three cover nearly everything a local business should publish, and all of them can be filmed on the same day as the advertising creative. What doesn't belong there is the quote graphic, the holiday greeting and the stock photograph of somebody else's team.

What actually belongs on the feed?

Things a customer would stop for, which is a shorter list than most businesses assume.

• The work itself. Jobs start to finish, the parts a customer never gets to see, the before and the after. The least glamorous thing filmed all day is usually the one that performs.
• The people. The owner first, because a stranger is deciding whether these are people they want on their property, and a logo can't answer that.
• The questions you answer on the phone every day. Each one is a post, and each one is also something an answer engine can quote later.
• Real customers, wherever they'll sit still for it.
• The occasional thing that's just your town. A hard freeze, a flooded intersection, the week everybody's system failed at once.

Everything on that list already exists inside the business. None of it has to be invented, which matters, because invention is what makes posting feel impossible.

How do I come up with this without it eating my week?

Film a month in one day and stop treating it as a daily task.

That's the whole method. Scripts get written first so nothing has to be thought up with a camera pointed at you, a crew of two comes to your own place, and everything for the month is shot in that single visit. Short vertical cuts for the feed, longer pieces for the website, photographs from the same morning.

Posting then becomes scheduling rather than creating, which is the only version of this that survives a busy season. Businesses that try to post daily from whatever happened that day post for three weeks and stop. Metcalf Media builds it as one production for that reason, and video and photo production is sold as the thing that feeds the advertising, the website and the feed at once.

Does anybody actually book a job from Instagram?

Rarely straight off the feed, and that's not what the feed is for.

The profile is a reference check. Somebody sees an advertisement, gets a name from a neighbor, or finds you in the map pack, and then looks you up before calling. What they find decides whether they call. An account with recent work, a face and a few reviews reads as a functioning business. An account whose last post is from two summers ago reads as one that might not be trading.

Real estate agents live at the extreme end of this, because the thing being bought is the person. A seller choosing between two agents in Tulsa will look at both feeds, and they're not comparing photography. They're working out which one appears to be busy, because busy reads as other people having already chosen them.

That's the job the feed does. Confirmation, at the moment somebody is deciding, rather than lead generation.

How often should I post?

Often enough that the account looks alive, which is a lower bar than the advice usually suggests.

A few times a week, every week, beats a burst followed by silence. An account that posts every day for a month and then nothing for two reads worse than one posting twice a week forever, because the gap is visible on the profile to anybody checking.

Frequency is also the wrong thing to fix first. One piece people watch to the end does more than five they scroll past, and posting more of what isn't working produces more of nothing.

What matters more than the count is that somebody checking the business out this week finds something from this month. That's the whole test, and any owner can apply it to their own profile in a glance.

What should I stop posting?

The things that fill a calendar and do no work.

• Quote graphics. Nobody has hired a contractor because of a sunrise and a sentence about perseverance.
• Holiday posts, unless the business genuinely has something to say about that day.
• Stock photography. A technician who is obviously not in Oklahoma does measurable damage.
• Reposted articles from an industry site nobody reads.
• Anything with no next step. If somebody watches it and wants the job done, tell them how.

Cutting that list usually halves what a business thought it had to produce, which is the point. Metcalf Media would rather a client post the work twice a week for a year than fill a grid with material nobody stopped for.

Do I have to be the one on camera?

No, and the honest version is that it works better when you are.

The crew, the trucks and the jobs can carry a feed on their own, and a lead technician who is comfortable talking often carries a camera better than the owner does. A customer deciding who to let into their house still responds to the person who runs the business more than to anything else that can be put on a screen, and almost nobody wants to do it.

That reluctance is the advantage. Every competitor in the market feels the same way, and most of them will carry on not doing it.