3 Time-Saving Social Media Tips for Trades AND CONSTRUCTION.

You’re double busy.

Because you wear a fair few (hard) hats in your Trades business, right?

Running between sites, picking up materials, (maybe even team members), jumping on the tools, managing your staff.

Not to mention taking client calls, emails, organising your printing, sorting out your van, quotes on the way home, invoicing and admin when you get in, fixing your website.

And to top it all off. When all that’s done, you still have to actually market your Trades business (so folk know you even exist!) by doing all your own Social Media too.

Wow.

I’m exhausted for you.

But do you ever find that when you do jump onto Facebook, Instagram and the likes, you end up wasting more time than an apprentice shopping for Tartan paint?

Yes. Exactly.

So we’ve come up with a few Trade tips to keep you on the straight and narrow when it comes to Social Media.

To spend your day better and to stop wasting valuable time.

First up.

Measure how much time you are spending on Social Media for your Trades business.

According to statistics, the average UK user spends 110 minutes on Social Media, per day.

For anyone else who is useless at quick math, that’s nearly 2 whole hours.

That’s over 11 hours a week.

What could you do with that time?

Watch 7 football matches in a row.

Work out. 11 times.

Hoover?

And do we think that whole 110 minutes is spent working on our business, replying to customers, networking in groups where we can start getting some enquiries – actually being productive?

I think not.

But let’s be honest. Many of us could agree to spending even more than 11 hours a week on social on some days.

Watching the video pranks other Trades pull on their Apprentice’s.

Having a good old moan about one thing or another in private Facebook groups for your Trade.

Scrolling through photos of dream cars and luxury houses we hope to afford one day.

These alone would take up best part of 2 hours.

We all do it. Get lost in the scroll. 

There’s no point trying to cut down your Social Media time if you don’t know how long you are spending (wasting) on it in the first place.

But lucky for you, we know how you can check.

Well, Facebook and Instagram, at least.

How to find out how much time you are spending on Facebook.

Here we go.

• Open the Facebook app.
• Click on your profile image in the bottom right hand corner.
• Scroll down to ‘Settings & Privacy’.
• Click on the More button (little arrow next to the words).
• Scroll to ‘Your Time on Facebook’.

Here, you will see all the graphs your heart desires to see how much time you’re spending on it. Enjoy.

WARNING – you will likely be shocked with the result.

Here’s Instagram.

How to find out how much time you are spending on Instagram.

• Open Instagram.
• Go to your personal page.
• Click the burger bar (the 3 horizontal lines) in the top right hand corner.
• Click ‘Your Activity’.
• Click the ‘Time’ tab.

Here, you will see another graph of your daily average time on the platform. Enjoy.

WARNING – again. You will likely be shocked with the result.

Great.

So now we know how much time we are spending on them.

After you’ve picked yourself up off of the floor and realised everything you could have been doing in life and business with the time you’ve spent on social media, you can move onto our first tip…

1. Set a limit for the time you spend on Facebook and Instagram in your Trades business and get an alert.

So the experts recommend 30 minutes or less per day as the maximum time you should spend on Social Media.

Really?

30 minutes is not even long enough to check out what’s been going on in the Trade Facebook group, let alone get back to messages, comments and the daily ‘I can’t help myself’ newsfeed scroll.

Anyway. We’ll take their word for it.

Our first tip is to take up the above. Work out how much time you’re spending on there.

On those very pages where they show you the graphs of your time spent, both Facebook and Instagram (as they are both owned by Mr Zuckerberg himself) give you the option to set a ‘Daily Time Reminder’.

Now this is genius.

If you are one of those Trades who get so easily lost for hours scrolling, maybe a reminder on your phone will encourage you to put it down.

Here, under ‘Daily Time Reminder,’ you can set a time limit for your use on Facebook and Instagram. It can be whatever you want. Try to make it something that will make a difference to your day.

So let’s say you DID set it to 30 minutes.

Once you have reached that amount of time spent on Facebook or Instagram (you will need to set them up separately on both platforms) you will get an alert to say you’ve reached your limit for the day.

Now you can start managing your time on Facebook and Instagram much better.

Instead of going on your phone and mindlessly scrolling whilst you’re waiting for the paint to dry or the kettle to boil, you know you’re on the clock, so will be more focused and use the time wisely – to get back to customers in the DM or interact in groups that will bring you business.

Give it a try.

Speaking of being more focused, this is my favourite tip to save time on Social Media.

And in my humble opinion, is a business game-changer.
Sure, you can report it to the powers that be on Facebook. But it could be weeks or months before Facebook take action and pull it down. If they even do so at all.

I’ll wish you luck with tracking down an agent that gets this removed for you. And extra Brownie points if it’s done within the month. 👍🏽

Report it anyway. Select that it violates Facebook’s community standards.

And report the reviewer as a fake account, if you think that it genuinely might be. Less than three ‘friends’ on Facebook and a faceless photo in the profile image tend to be a good indication that it is.

Or maybe it could just be they are super unpopular. Awkward.

But in the meantime, you can’t afford to leave it sitting there by itself.

2. Every Trade should delete Facebook.

You heard it here first.

And no, I’ve not lost the plot.

Honestly. You don’t need it.

‘But I get enquiries for my Trades business from Facebook. How can I delete it?’ I hear you say.

‘But my customers are on there. How will they speak to me?

Ok, ok. Let me explain.

I’m not saying to delete your Facebook account.

I’m saying to delete the app from your phone.

So you take away the temptation of procrastinating.

The likelihood is you have two pages – a personal Facebook profile and a business profile for your Trades business, right?

And the notifications from your clients commenting or enquiring get lost amongst the sea of notifications from your sister who LIKES all your posts, your aunt who invites you to FOLLOW every page under the sun and the mate who tags you in every rude meme on the internet.

Seriously. Where does he find these?

You can’t run a successful, professional Trades business like that.

But if the thought of deleting Facebook is giving you palpitations and making your palms sweaty, then at least move the app off the homepage on your phone and turn off the notifications.

You can always go onto Facebook itself when you are home of an evening or weekend to check if anything important needs addressing.

You can breathe easy now.

What if there was a way you could see ONLY your Trade Facebook Business page without getting side tracked by all the personal nonsense on Social Media?

What if all your Trade Facebook Business page notifications were in one place, WITHOUT any personal notifications popping up?

What if you never missed a Trade Facebook Business page Direct Message again because it didn’t get lost in amongst messages from your friends and family?

Boy, do I have the answer for you.

You need to download the Business Suite app.

It’s by Facebook. Or Meta. As they now like to be called.

It’s free.

And is the BEST way for you to manage your Trade business affairs on Facebook – your pages, comments, messages - everyday, without getting distracted or muddled up with your personal life. 

Which means when you actually go on there it will be for business only.

So you’re a lot less likely to spend so much time on it – freeing up all those 110 minutes of the day to go build your business, spend time with the family or do something epic.

Oh. Another bonus.

Because Mark Zuckerberg owns both of these, you have the added beauty of linking your Business Facebook and Business Instagram pages.

Why is this good?

Because if you link them, the Business Suite app will show you your Facebook notifications, messages etc AND your Instagram ones too – all in one place!

Which… shut the well hung fire door…. Means you could even delete Instagram from your phone too as you can manage both bad-boy platforms in one app!

And it wouldn’t have a detrimental effect on your Trades business. Winning.

Go on. I dare you.

Delete.

3. Batch and schedule your Facebook and Instagram posts for your Trades business.

Let me ask you something.

Even if you’re not a decorator, I’m sure as a fully-fledged Tradesperson you will get this.

If you were hired to re-decorate a room, would you scrape the wallpaper off, sand the wall, check for holes and cracks (insert joke here), do any filling, sand that down, prime the wall then paint it… FOR JUST ONE WALL?

Then move onto the NEXT WALL doing it all again, scrape off the paper, sand… (you catch my drift).

No you wouldn’t! You would batch the tasks. Right?

You would go into that room and scrape ALL the wallpaper off of ALL of the walls.

Then you would ‘get your sand on’ and sand down ALL of the walls.

After, you’d check for holes and cracks (insert more jokes here) on ALL of the walls.

Etc, etc.

And why do you do this?

Because it saves time, energy and workload by batching your tasks.

How? Because your mind is on one job at a time.

You set out all your equipment and materials – your sander or filler - ready to do all the work in bulk. Not getting it out and putting it away again multiple times.

Once finished, you remove everything you no longer need out of the room before moving onto the next task, so the next task is easier to action (i.e. not tripping over ladders and sanders).

You don’t paint a wall with your fancy Farrow & Ball paint (other paint brands are available) then whilst it’s drying, sand the wall next to it, do you?

(It’s a rhetorical question. But if you do, I think you may need to rethink your career choice).

Why don’t you do that? Because you’ll make a mess and end up having to re-paint the wall from all the dust that sticks to it from sanding the next wall. Giving yourself MORE work.

So here’s the Social Media link.

Stop giving yourself MORE work.

If you ONLY manage your Trades Social Media platforms by ‘posting as you go’ you might as well be decorating one wall at a time.

And we know how that ends.

Just like you batch your tasks in your day-to-day Trades business, you need to batch your Social Media tasks too to save mistakes, time, energy and having to re-do it.

Yes. Take photos and videos on site. Create an album on your phone.

But hold onto them.

Just like you set aside time to sit down and do your invoices, assign yourself some time for social media too.

Even if, to start with, it’s as little as 1 hour a month.

Sit down and scheduling 4 posts. One that goes out every week. And do it all in one hit.

Why batching and scheduling your Trades Social Media posts will save you time.

• Because you’ll do it quicker. Your mind is on one thing.

• You’ll make less mistakes. You’re not distracted from site.

• You can batch all the tasks. Edit all your photos. Then write your statuses all in 1 go.

• You have posts popping up throughout the week, even the month, whilst you work. Not letting your marketing distract your busy day on the tools.

• By scheduling, you won’t be posting at silly o’ clock at night when folk are asleep and you’re still on site or just getting home – meaning less people see it. You can schedule it to go live at the best time of day that your Ideal Client are likely to be online.

• You can do all this on your computer. Which is much faster than doing it from your phone.

The alternative.

The ‘Do It As I Go’ approach.

The one where you might take a photo on site. Bang in the middle of the day. Mid-job.

Think, ‘this is pretty good’.

So put down your tools and stop what you are actually doing.

Edit it a bit on your photo app. Upload it from your phone.

Think about what to write. Start typing a status.

Get called away by a subbie or client. Come back to finish it an hour later. Play around with some emoji’s. (What the hell is a Facebook ‘feeling’).

3 hours later it’s posted. You keep checking your phone to see if it has any likes.

Someone points out you’ve made a bunch of spelling errors. Brilliant.

Oh. And you’ve fallen behind on site because you spent ages trying to promote yourself online in the middle of the day.

Sound familiar?

I am all for being current on your Facebook and Instagram.

I encourage going LIVE on all your pages so that the platforms show you to more of your audience.

But if this is how you are managing your pages day in, day out – no prep, no batching, no scheduling - you are wasting HOURS of your time. Trust me.

So stop doing it.

Batch and schedule instead.

TRADE SOCIAL MEDIA TIME-SAVER RUNDOWN:

1.         Set a limit on the amount of time you are spending on Facebook and Instagram by setting alerts on your phone (in the apps themselves) to tell you when you’ve reached your limit for the day.

2.         Delete the Facebook app from your phone. Or move the app icon off of your Homepage. Link your Facebook and Instagram accounts. Download the Meta Business Suite app where you can manage both platforms for your Trades business without being distracted by personal posts and notifications. Delete/remove the Instagram app from your phone too if you’re feeling daring.

3.         Batch and schedule your Facebook and Instagram posts from a computer, all in one hit, so you are not doing it ‘as and when.’

Need a little more help nailing your Trades Social Media?

Course you do.

First. Let’s work out where you are with your Social Media.
Got 3 minutes?

Take our Trades Quiz to discover how you score on Social Media and everything else “Off The Tools’.

We have heaps of tips, tricks and hacks for your Trades business in our cheat sheets, videos and ideas waiting for you on the other side… i.e. your results page.

So you can improve your score. And NAIL your Trades business..