Social Media for Painters & Decorators
Your best post is a room you finished on a Tuesday and forgot to photograph
You produce more content than any other trade and keep none of it
A full interior decoration on a three-bed is £3,260. Exterior painting, £2,380. A kitchen refresh, £915. Wallpaper hanging, £445. A single room, £410.
Look at the frequency in those numbers. A builder finishes eight jobs a year. You finish something most weeks — sometimes several times a week. Over a year you complete more distinct, visually finished, photographable pieces of work than almost any trade in the country.
And the standard state of a decorator’s social media is eleven posts, four of them from 2023.
The problem isn’t that you have nothing to show. It’s that finishing is so routine to you that it doesn’t register as an event worth recording. The room looks right, you clean up, you go home. To the customer looking at it three weeks later on their phone, that room is the entire reason they ring you.
Two seasons, two completely different customers
Decorating splits harder by season than any other trade on this list, and your content should split with it.
Interior work is autumn and winter. Domestic, emotional, driven by Christmas, a new baby, a house move, or simply being sick of the colour. These customers buy on look. They want to see rooms.
Exterior work is spring and summer. More practical, often overdue, frequently triggered by a survey or by a neighbour having theirs done. These customers buy on protection and tidiness. They want to see clean lines, prepared woodwork and a house that looks cared for.
Posting interior transformations in June and render work in January is the most common and most costly mistake in this trade’s marketing. Same effort, wrong month, half the return.
The ratio
A full interior is £3,260. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One interior job pays for five and a half years.
But the number that actually matters for decorators is repeat and referral. A decorator with a good year is usually a decorator working through one street, one estate agent, or one landlord’s portfolio. Content is how a job on one street becomes three on the same street, because the neighbours see it.
What we’d actually do
One room, three photographs. Before, cut-in halfway through, finished in daylight. The halfway shot is the persuasive one — clean lines against masking is the whole craft made visible.
Post local. “Finished on Yarmouth Road this week” is the most effective sentence a decorator can write. Decorating spreads by proximity more than any other trade.
Colour names, every time. People search for colours. Naming the paint and the finish gets you found by someone who has already decided what they want and only needs someone to apply it.
Preparation, for the exterior season. Anyone can put a coat on. Showing filled, sanded, primed woodwork is how you justify being twice the price of the man with a roller and a ladder.
What good looks like at six months
- A room a week, roughly — fifty pieces of finished work over a year
- Seasonally aligned: interiors from September, exteriors from March
- A gallery organised by room type, because customers search “living room” not “emulsion”
- Recent local work visible enough that a neighbour recognises the street
Mistakes we see most
Photographing with the furniture back in. Take it before you put the room back. Ten seconds, and it’s the difference between a photograph and a snapshot.
Flash. It flattens the finish, which is the only thing you’re selling. Daylight, curtains open, lights off.
No before. A well-painted wall is just a wall. The before is what makes the after mean something.
Treating exterior work as an afterthought. It’s £2,380 a job, it’s weather-dependent, and it has a three-month buying window. It deserves its own campaign, not a stray post in April.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Decorating runs on a lot of small, fast-moving jobs, which is exactly where enquiries get lost. A comment on Tuesday, a message on Thursday, and by the weekend you can’t remember which was which.
Both land as opportunities with the thread attached. Quote templates for a single room, a full interior and exterior work are priced already, so the quote goes out that evening.
And because decorating is genuinely cyclical — most homes want redecorating every five to seven years — the job record makes a reminder possible. A customer you painted for in 2026 is a live prospect in 2032, and nobody in this trade ever contacts them.
The one thing worth doing if you do nothing else
Photograph every room before you put the furniture back.
That is it. Not a strategy, not a schedule, not a platform decision. Decorators lose more marketing value in the ten minutes at the end of a job than in everything else combined, because the room is never again as clean, as empty or as well lit as it is right then. Once the sofa is back and the curtains are up, that photograph is gone for five years.
Do that on every job for three months and you will have thirty pieces of genuine, local, recent proof. That is more than almost any decorator in your town has, and it is the raw material for everything else on this page.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1-2. We fix the photography, which for decorators is almost always the entire problem. Curtains open, artificial light off, furniture out, phone held level, one consistent corner of the room. We will shoot two jobs with you and after that it is a habit that costs you thirty seconds a room.
Weeks 3-6. We build the room-type gallery on the site: living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, hallways, exteriors. That is genuinely how customers browse and how they search. Somebody who wants their hallway done does not want to scroll past eleven bedrooms to find one.
Weeks 7-12. We align everything to the season. Starting in autumn that means interiors hard from September through to Christmas, with exterior preparation content seeded from February so you are visible before the March rush rather than during it. We also set up the local angle, naming streets, estates and areas, because decorating spreads by proximity more reliably than any other trade on this list.
The measure at ninety days is whether a neighbour of a job you finished can find you without already knowing your name.
Questions decorators ask
Is it worth posting a single room? Yes. Single rooms are £410 and they are how a full interior at £3,260 starts.
My photographs look flat. Open the curtains, turn the artificial lights off, stand in the corner, hold the phone level. That’s most of it.
Should I post the exterior jobs in winter? Post the preparation content in winter, so you’re in mind when the weather turns. The booking happens in March; the deciding happens in February.
What about wallpaper? It’s £445 and it photographs better than anything else you do. Post more of it than you think you should.
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