Social Media for Plumbers
Emergency work never comes from social media. Your reputation does, and that’s what wins it
Separate the two halves of your business before spending a penny
A bathroom refit is £1,850. A boiler replacement, £1,670. A shower installation, £840. A leak repair, £235. A blocked drain, £215.
Those five numbers are two completely different businesses wearing the same van.
The top three are planned work. Someone has decided to spend money improving their house, they’re taking their time, and they’re comparing two or three names. That decision has a research phase, and research phases can be influenced.
The bottom two are emergencies. Water is coming through a ceiling at nine on a Sunday evening. That customer opens Google, rings the first three results and goes with whoever answers the phone. They are not scrolling. They are not comparing. No amount of social media will reach them inside that ninety seconds.
So be honest about it: social media has essentially no role in your emergency work, and a significant one in everything else. Anyone selling you a social package as a fix for emergency call volume is selling you the wrong thing.
What it actually does for the planned half
A bathroom is £1,850 and it is a considered purchase. People look at bathrooms for weeks. They save pictures. They ask in local groups — and “can anyone recommend a plumber for a bathroom?” is one of the most reliably recurring posts in any town’s community group, week in and week out.
Being the name that gets tagged in those threads is the single highest-value thing social media does for a plumber. It is not achieved by posting more. It’s achieved by having enough visible, recent, local, well-photographed work that the person answering the thread remembers you exist.
That’s the goal, and it’s worth stating precisely because it’s unusual: not reach, not followers, but recall at the moment somebody else is recommending you to a stranger.
The ratio
A bathroom refit is £1,850. Our Seen package is £29 a month — £348 a year. One bathroom covers well over five years.
Two boiler replacements a year that you’d otherwise not have had pays for everything we do at the top tier with room to spare. And a bathroom customer is very often a boiler customer eighteen months later, because you were the plumber who did a good job and they kept the number in their phone.
What we’d actually do
Photograph the bathrooms properly and nothing else obsessively. A finished bathroom is the only genuinely attractive thing plumbing produces. It photographs well, people save it, and it’s what gets you tagged. Leak repairs and drain clearances do not need documenting, however satisfying they were.
Get into the local groups without selling. The plumber who answers “why does my boiler keep losing pressure?” honestly, for free, and without pitching becomes the plumber everybody tags six months later. It is slow and it outperforms advertising by a distance.
Post the boiler content in September. Boiler replacement is brutally seasonal and the decision is usually made in the first genuinely cold week. Everything you want a homeowner to understand about replacing a boiler needs to be visible before that week, not during it.
Show the pipework. Under the bath, behind the cistern, in the airing cupboard. A homeowner cannot tell a good plumbing job from a bad one by looking at the tiles. Showing the part nobody sees is how you justify not being the cheapest quote, without ever discussing price.
What good looks like at six months
- Every bathroom photographed, six to ten a year, in daylight
- A genuine presence in two or three local community groups
- Boiler content live from late August, not late October
- Google reviews growing steadily, because that’s where emergency work is actually won or lost
- Enough recall that your name appears in recommendation threads you were never part of
Mistakes we see most
Trying to win emergency work on social. It cannot be done. Put that effort into your Google Business Profile, your answer rate and your reviews, which is where the nine-o’clock customer genuinely looks.
Posting drain photographs. We understand the appeal. The customer does not share it.
Selling in community groups. One overt pitch and you become the plumber who advertises in the group, which is a hard reputation to shed. Answer questions instead and the work follows.
Neglecting Gas Safe. It’s around £310 a year, it’s legally mandatory for the gas side of your work, and it’s the strongest trust signal you own. It should be visible everywhere and explained rather than just displayed as a logo.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Plumbing generates a lot of small enquiries from a lot of directions, and the ones that get lost are almost always the planned jobs — the bathroom enquiry that arrived while you were under someone’s sink.
Every message and comment lands as an opportunity, so the bathroom that came in on Tuesday is still there on Friday with the conversation attached. Quote templates for bathrooms, boilers and showers are priced already, so a considered customer gets a considered quote the same day rather than losing patience and ringing the next name on the list.
Boiler installations generate an annual service schedule automatically, which turns a £1,670 one-off into a customer who comes back every year — and the reminder goes out whether or not you remember it exists.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1-2. We fix the emergency side first, because it is the majority of most plumbers’ revenue and it has almost nothing to do with social media. Google Business Profile, response time, review volume, and a phone number that is tappable on every page of the site.
Weeks 3-6. We start photographing the planned work, bathrooms above all, and get you into the local groups as a helpful presence rather than an advertiser. This is deliberately slow and it is the highest-return thing available to a plumber who wants more bathroom work.
Weeks 7-12. We prepare the September boiler push. Everything a homeowner needs to understand about replacing a boiler, written and scheduled to land before the first cold week rather than during it, when everybody else is shouting and nobody is listening.
At ninety days the measure is whether your name has started appearing in local recommendation threads that you were never part of. That is the signal that the planned half of your business has begun compounding rather than depending entirely on you.
Questions plumbers ask
Is any of this worth it if most of my work is emergency? Then most of your budget should go to Google and reviews, and social should be a light, cheap presence supporting the planned half. We’d tell you that rather than sell you a package you don’t need.
Which platform? Facebook, almost entirely, because that’s where local recommendation threads happen. Instagram only if you do a lot of bathrooms and photograph them well.
How do I photograph a bathroom in a small room? Stand in the doorway, phone level and low, lights on, lid down, towels off the rail, mirror wiped. That’s most of the battle.
Do I need to post every week? No. Post when you finish something worth showing. Consistency matters far less here than being recalled at the right moment by someone else.
Get your free website review · Bigger outfit? Talk to us
See what we'd do for plumbers
Put your website in and we'll tell you what's losing you work — speed, mobile, your Google profile, reviews and the pages you're missing. Two minutes, no call unless you want one.