Most owners we talk to in Sherman and Denison have a love-hate thing going with social media. They know their customers are on it. They also know a Facebook page whose last post went up in 2023 looks worse than having no page at all. Good social media management fixes that second problem without eating your evenings.
The audience hasn’t gone anywhere. In Pew Research Center’s 2025 survey of U.S. adults, 84% said they use YouTube, 71% Facebook and 50% Instagram. So the people who need a plumber in Pottsboro or a stylist in Gainesville are scrolling the same feeds as everyone else. What matters is whether you show up there looking open for business.
What social media management actually includes
Posting is the part everyone pictures, and it’s maybe a third of the job. The rest is answering comments and messages, keeping hours and contact details right on every profile, keeping an eye on reviews and recommendations on Facebook, and checking once a month whether any of it turned into calls.
If you only do the posting, you’ve put up a billboard nobody can talk to. People message businesses on Facebook and Instagram the way they used to pick up the phone. An unread message from a homeowner with a leaking water heater is a lost job, same as a missed call.
Pick two platforms and keep them current
You don’t need to be everywhere. For most Texoma service businesses, Facebook matters most. It’s where the neighborhood groups and the “who do y’all use for gutters?” threads live, and it’s where a lot of homeowners over 40 still spend their scrolling time. Instagram comes second if your work photographs well: landscaping, remodels, hair, food, detailing.
Add YouTube or TikTok when you’re ready to make short videos, and not before. A dead TikTok account helps nobody. If you’re weighing it, we wrote a separate piece on short-form video for local businesses.
Two accounts kept up beat five that went quiet in March.
Post the things a franchise can’t
The posts that do well for local businesses tend to be the plain ones. A photo of today’s job. The crew loading the trailer at 7 a.m. A backyard in Van Alstyne before and after. A 30-second answer to a question customers ask every week. Some ideas that hold up:
- Finished work, with the town named in the caption
- Your people, by first name
- Seasonal reminders that help someone, like an AC check before the first 100-degree week or a pipe warning before a hard freeze
- Answers to the questions you hear on every estimate
- Local things you’re part of: the ball team you sponsor, the fundraiser at church, the booth at the county fair
Skip the stock photos and the “Happy National Donut Day” graphics. People scroll right past them, and they make your page look like every other page. Meta Business Suite lets you schedule Facebook and Instagram posts for free, so you can batch a month of posts on a slow Tuesday afternoon and be done with it.
Reply like it’s a phone call
This is where most business pages fall apart. Someone comments “Do you service Bonham?” and it sits for four days. By then they’ve hired someone else.
Make it a rule that comments and messages get answered the same business day. Turn on page notifications on one phone that somebody actually checks. Saved replies in Meta Business Suite handle the questions you get constantly (hours, service area, how to get a quote), and a personal line on top keeps them from sounding canned.
Speed matters more than polish. We made the case in our piece on lead response time: the business that answers first usually gets the job, and a Facebook message is no different from a phone call.
Negative comments get a reply too. Keep it public, calm and short, and offer to sort it out by phone. Deleting a complaint usually makes the person louder.
Count calls, not likes
Every platform will hand you reach and engagement numbers. They’re useful for seeing which posts people liked. They won’t tell you whether the phone rang.
Some low-tech ways to tie social media to real customers:
- Ask every new caller how they heard about you and write it down. A spreadsheet is fine.
- When you share your website in a post, use a tagged link (a UTM link) so Google Analytics can show which visits came from Facebook.
- Track message volume month to month. For some local businesses, Messenger brings in more leads than the website form does, and you won’t know until you count.
- Open your page insights once a month. Not once an hour.
If you’d rather have that tracked for you, our reporting shows who visited your site, how they found you and who called.
Doing social media management yourself or hiring it out
Plenty of owners run their own pages well. If you enjoy it, can find 45 minutes a week and take a decent photo on your phone, do it yourself. You know your customers better than any agency does.
Hiring it out makes sense when the page goes dark every busy season, when nobody on staff owns the messages, or when you want steady posting and some video but don’t have the hours. Know the tradeoff going in. An outside manager needs your job photos, your stories and your quick answers to sound like you, and a good one will keep asking for them. If they never ask, you’ll get generic posts. If you’d rather hand it off, here’s how our social media management service works.