The honest answer is: less often than you have been told, and far more consistently than you are currently managing.
The number
Two to three times a week. Not because three is a magic number, but because it is the highest cadence most contractors can actually hold through a busy season — and a cadence you abandon in July is worth less than a smaller one you keep all year.
Posting daily for three weeks and then vanishing for two months is the single most common pattern in the trades. It performs worse than posting once a week without fail. The audience stops expecting anything from you, and the platform stops showing you to them, so when you come back you are starting from a standing start.
Pick the cadence you can hold in your worst week, not your best one.
Where the content comes from
This is the real problem. Nobody runs out of enthusiasm, they run out of material — usually in week three. The fix is to stop treating content as a separate task that competes with the job, and start treating one job as a month of posts.
One job, properly documented
- Before. The problem, shot honestly. Cracked, sunken, worn, failing.
- Prep. Excavation, base, drainage — whatever the customer never sees and always pays for. This is the most persuasive content you have and almost nobody captures it.
- In progress. Crew working, machinery running, material going down.
- Detail. Edges, joints, transitions. The things that separate a good job from a fast one.
- After. The finished result in decent light, from the angle the homeowner sees when they pull in.
- Wide. The whole property, so scale reads properly.
That is six posts from one job before you have written a word. Add a thirty-second video walking the finished work and explaining one decision you made, and it is seven. Two jobs a month covers a two-to-three-a-week cadence with room to spare.
The five-minute habit
The crews that manage this do one thing: somebody takes the before shots before the machinery arrives, every time, without being asked. Once that is a habit, the after shots take care of themselves because there is now a pair worth posting. Without the before, the after is just a clip of a driveway.
What to post, in order of what works
- Before and after, side by side. Nothing else comes close, in any trade.
- Process explained. Why you did the thing the cheap quote skips. This wins jobs at the estimate stage because the homeowner repeats your reasoning back to the next contractor.
- Finished work in good light. Straightforward, and it works.
- The crew. People hire people, particularly for work happening at their house while they are out.
- Answers to questions you get on every estimate. How long does it take, when can you start, why does it cost that. These quietly close deals.
What to stop posting
- Stock images of tools you do not own.
- Holiday graphics with your logo dropped on them.
- Motivational quotes.
- Anything that could have been posted by any contractor in any state.
Seasonality is not an excuse to stop
Most trades have a dead stretch. That stretch is when you should be posting the material you banked in season, because it is also when homeowners are researching for spring. The businesses that go quiet in January are competing in April against the ones who did not.
More on how we approach this in content for contractors, with a worked example in the PaveCrafters case study.