Social Media for Gas Engineers
The lowest job value on our list, and the strongest reason to be visible all year
Your problem is volume, and volume is a visibility problem
A power flush is £615. A gas meter relocation, £425. An emergency gas repair, £255. A hob and oven connection, £255. An appliance service, £125.
That £125 is the lowest single job value of any trade we work with, and it is also the most important number in your business — because it comes back every twelve months for as long as you keep the customer.
Two hundred service customers at £125 is £25,000 a year that arrives whether or not anybody rings you. Lose forty of them to silence and you’ve lost £5,000 without noticing, because nobody phones to cancel a boiler service. They simply don’t book, and you assume they moved house.
That is the whole commercial problem for a gas engineer, and it is a retention problem far more than an acquisition one. Social media matters here for one specific and slightly unusual reason: it is the cheapest way to stay visible to people who already know you, during the eleven months of the year when you are not standing in their kitchen.
Why the reminder and the post do the same job
Your service reminders are the most valuable thing you send. They should go by email and text, and they should be automated so they happen without you.
But a reminder only reaches the people whose details you hold and whose email still works. A post reaches the ones whose address you’ve lost, whose email bounced two years ago, and whose landlord has changed agent since — and crucially, it reaches them in the same week.
Post “gas safety checks are booking up for October” in mid-September and two things happen. Existing customers who missed the email book in. And their neighbours, who are also vaguely thinking about it, see a local gas engineer being visible about precisely the thing on their mind.
That is the entire strategy. Not audience building. Reminder reinforcement, for nothing, at scale.
The ratio
Our Seen package is £29 a month — £348 a year. That’s under three appliance services.
Look at it as retention rather than acquisition and it isn’t close. If being visible saves you twenty customers a year at £125 each, that’s £2,500 recovered against £348 spent — and those twenty come back the following year, and the year after that, which is how a small annual figure compounds into the most reliable revenue in the business.
Almost nothing else in marketing has that shape. You are not buying leads. You are stopping leaks in a bucket you have already filled.
What we’d actually do
Run the year by the boiler calendar. August and September are gas safety certificates and pre-winter servicing. October and November are breakdowns and the “should I replace it or repair it?” question. January is emergency and cold-weather content. Spring is landlord certificate renewals. That calendar writes itself and almost nobody follows it.
Post the safety content properly. Carbon monoxide, flue checks, the risk of unregistered fitters. This is the rare case where genuinely useful public-safety information is also excellent marketing, and it gets shared locally more than anything else a trade posts.
Make Gas Safe the centre of it. Registration is around £310 a year and it is legally mandatory — nobody can lawfully touch gas without it. Say so plainly and often. “Check the card, check the register” is a public service, and it quietly removes every unregistered competitor in your area from consideration.
Speak to landlords separately. A landlord gas safety certificate is a legal requirement with a hard annual date and a real penalty for missing it. That audience wants competence and speed rather than friendliness, and they arrive a portfolio at a time rather than one house at a time.
What good looks like at six months
- A visible seasonal rhythm that matches the boiler year rather than a generic posting schedule
- Service reminders going out automatically, with posts reinforcing them in the same week
- A measurable rebooking rate, which is the number that actually matters in this trade
- Landlord certificates renewing on schedule rather than being chased in arrears
- Local recognition as the gas engineer who explains things rather than the one who turns up
Mistakes we see most
Chasing new customers while the existing base leaks. A gas engineer with two hundred customers and no reminder system is losing more money to silence every year than any advertising spend could plausibly recover.
Only appearing during a cold snap. Everyone appears during the cold snap. The engineer who was visible in September already has October booked out.
Treating the £125 service as small. It is the entry point to a boiler replacement, a power flush and fifteen years of an annual relationship. It is the most valuable £125 in the trades.
Assuming the reminder is enough on its own. Email deliverability being what it is, a meaningful share of your reminders are never seen by anyone. The post is the safety net underneath them.
Where this lands in Gaffer
This trade is the clearest case for the platform of any we work with, because the entire business is a calendar.
Every service creates next year’s reminder automatically. Landlord certificates carry a hard expiry with escalating prompts in the weeks before the date. Certificates generate against the job and go to the customer and their agent the same day rather than in a batch at the weekend. Churn risk flags the customers who didn’t rebook, so you can ring the twenty people who quietly drifted rather than discovering the gap months later in your accounts.
The posting sits on top of all that as reinforcement — same message, same week, different channel, no additional work from you.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1-2. We get the service reminders working before anything else, because that is where the money is. Every customer you have, on a twelve-month cycle, with the reminder going out automatically whether or not you remember it exists. If we did nothing else at all, this alone would pay for the year.
Weeks 3-6. We find the customers who have already drifted. Most gas engineers have a list of people last seen two or three years ago who never actively left, and a straightforward, non-pushy “your boiler is due” to that list routinely recovers more work than any advertising would.
Weeks 7-12. We build the seasonal calendar and the safety content, and we get the landlord certificates onto a hard schedule with escalating prompts before each expiry date rather than apologies after it.
At ninety days the number we care about is the rebooking rate. Not reach, not followers, not impressions. What proportion of last year’s service customers have booked again is the only figure that describes whether this trade is healthy.
Questions gas engineers ask
Is social really worth it at £125 a job? Only as retention. As lead generation it would be marginal at that job value. As a way of keeping two hundred existing customers booking every year, it is the cheapest thing available to you.
What do I post that isn’t boring? Safety content, honestly. It is genuinely useful, people share it locally, and it positions you exactly as you want to be positioned.
Should I show my Gas Safe number? Always, everywhere, and tell people how to check it against the register. It takes one line on your profile and it disqualifies everybody operating illegally in your area.
How much of my time is this? With reminders automated, roughly a post a week in season and less out of it. We write them; you approve them.
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