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A Painter's Guide To Social Media In 2023

Social Media is one of the most important marketing channels for any painting contractor in the world. It’s the best place to get started for your business because it’s FREE! (Kinda…) However, one of the biggest issues I see painting contractors make with their social media is the inconsistency in their strategies and posting schedules. 

Strategizing for social media is further below, but the best way to regularly post to social media is with something like a post planner. One of my favorite social media post planners is Later. Later is great because they’ve been around for a long time and offer a pretty solid free plan. 

The social media essentials 

Three Things To Remember

Social Media Is Now Video Based

You can thank TikTok for this one! Back on June 30, 2021 Instagram's Founder, Adam Mosseri, made a post about this change happening. Since then, we've only seen more and more video content being produced and interacted with on social media.

Facebook Is Where The Target Market Is At

For painting contractors, Facebook is where most of their target market is at. Social platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and SnapChat have no use for your business.

Social Media Is Constantly Changing

This article is being produced towards the end of 2022 so it's quite possible by the end of 2023 some of this information might be outdated. The most important thing I recommend is that you should constantly be using new features of these platforms. It's in the algorithm's incentive to push this sort of content!

A Social Media Guide For Facebook

Facebook’s Audience

First and foremost, it’s important to recognize how dominant Facebook has been in the last decade for being a social media platform. (MySpace walked so Facebook could run) Due to this, most painter’s target client are more active on this site than others. If you could only run one social media profile, this is the one to prioritize. 

Where To Start 

I cannot stress this enough, you want to fill out every aspect of your profile when you set up your page. (Categories, Hours, Services, Descriptions, etc) Secondly, you want to choose an appropriate selection of imagery for your profile picture and cover photo. Keep in mind how the cover photos look on desktop vs mobile. When it comes to the profile picture, that’s where your logo typically works best but be mindful of how it appears. 

You want your Facebook page to be a simplified version of a website. Pretend there is no website for them to visit to learn more and utilize photo albums as if they were pages on your site. Set up a photo album for every service you offer and feature only the best imagery you have in each of them. You can take this one step further if you have graphics, or stylized text from Canva. You can even create an album dedicated to FAQ’s, Reviews, About You, and more! 

What To Post

Typically, a good variety of content is the best strategy because it keeps engagement with your existing following. However, your work is the most important piece of content to be sharing. Here are all the different types of posts to consider organized by what I think is important:

  1. Before and Afters (photos)
  2. Finished Projects (photos, videos, lives) 
  3. Featured Testimonials and Experiences (graphics, videos)
  4. Company Updates (photos, videos, graphics, lives)
  5. On-Going Projects (videos, lives)
  6. Sharing Professional Insight (graphics, videos, lives)
  7. Behind-The-Scenes (photos, lives)
  8. Community Events (photos, videos, lives)
  9. Pets On-Site (photos, videos)
  10. Funny Things


Don’t forget you can always pin posts to the top of your page if you’re noticing they get great engagement or if they’re important. (Want more cabinet projects, pin your best cabinet project post)

For the post descriptions,  remember this is social media not advertising media. There’s no need to explicitly say “buy our shit” that’s implied just by being a business page. Save the post descriptions for a chance to be social, be funny, and let your personality shine through. If you can’t come up with anything, use a thesaurus to find a new phrase to use and put an emoji in it. 

Lean into your strengths for posting on social media! I’m always a fan of the path of least resistance. There’s no point taking a video of your professional insight on a brand of paint if it feels like pulling teeth to do so! Post something else instead. Quality is most important.

Organic Strategies

Your Facebook page needs a following to be taken seriously. It subliminally builds trust and credibility when you reach that 1,000 follower threshold. Organic strategies for social media are typically a great way to get started because they are cost effective. You have to be your biggest advocate for your business and invite every single person you know to like your Facebook page. I personally don’t like the idea of spamming friends and family but why shouldn’t your friends and family support you? 

Another “organic” way to grow your following is by incentivizing growth. For example, a post that says “Tag three people you know and follow our page to be entered in this giveaway.”  This is on the border of organic/paid because typically you need something to offer. However, this is where you can be creative! A color consultation is something that doesn’t cost too much other than time of yours so that’s a potential offer. 

Paid Strategies

Boosting Posts

This strategy is typically the best option for most contractors because the content is key for any paid marketing on Facebook. Boosting posts allows you to share the content that’s already getting the most engagement.

My standard recommendation for boosting posts is to first post at least once a week on social media. At the end of the month, you then look for the post that got the most interactions from it and choose that to boost. A budget between ($50-200) usually works per boosted post. Set the timeframe for the month and let that post work it’s magic! 

Keep in mind you can always increase the frequency of this strategy! It’s also important to test different post types, budgets, and target audiences. 

You can’t always expect leads to happen right away (that’s ideal and possible) but the more realistic expectation is to grow your following. It sometimes takes a few months or even years for a social media follower to become a customer. 

If you’re boosting more than 4 posts a month, that’s when Facebook ads start to make more sense as well. 

Facebook Ads

If you have an expansive catalog of professional-grade content to share, Facebook Ads makes more sense. The problem is that not a lot of people have great content so boosted posts makes more sense for them. If you only have a few professional-grade pieces of content ads won’t work for the long time because eventually the same piece of content will be appearing over and over in your target audience’s feeds. That’s why a good variety of content is necessary so you can rotate what gets shown. 

Ultimately videos are the best piece of content to use for Facebook ads because of the level of targeting you can get with them. For example, if someone engages with the video you can have a separate campaign that specifically will show a different post with an emphasis on a call-to-action.

Retargeting Ads

One of my personal favorite and most effective forms of paid advertising on social media is website retargeting. This is when you specifically show ads to people who visited your website but didn’t reach out. For the next 30 days, you occasionally pop up in their feed reminding them what makes you exceptional! You don’t need professional-grade content but it certainly helps. The downside is that you need a lot of a traffic flowing through your website to take advantage of this strategy. 

How To Boost Posts & Set Up A Target Social Media Audience

A Social Media Guide For Instagram

Understanding Instagram

Instagram is certainly an extremely popular social media platform, however it appeals to a younger audience than Facebook. I think it’s important to embrace due to the fact the future target audience is on there instead of Facebook. It doesn’t hurt to start growing but I don’t think it should be a huge priority unless you’re trying to network. 

You’re more likely to be seen by another business than a homeworker. This is why I like to use Instagram as a social media for networking. It’s a great place to get in front of realtors and interior designers because they are active here. Another important thing to keep in mind is that this is a global platform. It’s very hard to grow a local following on here due to the fact people from anywhere can interact with you.

The Algorithm 

Instagram is certainly more complex than Facebook because of how much the algorithm impacts an account. One thing will never change about this social media, the more interaction you can get, the more people you reach. Let me repeat that: the more interaction you can get, the more people you reach.

So, ultimately you want to create engaging content! Anything that gets users to interact with your profile is what you want. It goes beyond just likes and comments. Stories that create engagement through a variety of the little things, this is why IG offers polls, Q+A’s, sliders, and consistently more features.

Where To Start 

Like I mentioned about Facebook, you want your social media page to be a simplified version of your website. On FB, this is possible with photo albums. On IG, this is possible with featured story highlights! 

Cohesive imagery is your best friend on Instagram. For example, choosing icons that match as story highlight covers immediately gives a great first impression on this platform! If you want to be elite, you can specifically choose a “color tone” to embrace so your entire feed looks similar to one another. That’s pretty challenging though so I don’t recommend it unless you have a huge backlog of content to choose from. 

What To Post

Everything that was mentioned in the Facebook section above is applicable here. However, IG is primarily becoming a video platform so Reels work best for a post type. Instgram regularly introduces new post types so it’s important to be an early adopter of those. Currently, Guides are the new feature to embrace which I see very few accounts taking advantage of! 

Save the quality content for posts/reels and all the rest for stories. 

Hashtags

You can use all the same paid/organic strategies from Facebook but Hashtags are especially important for Instagram’s organic growth as well as networking opportunities. You can use up to 30 hashtags and I recommend using all 30 as long as they make sense. However, I’d say rotating your hashtags is more important than using 30 different ones. Using the same hashtags over and over can get your account shadowbanned.

I recommend putting these hashtags directly at the bottom of your post description however if you’re using the FB->IG posting feature then it makes more sense to include the hashtags as a comment instead. Hashtags look out of place on FB especially if it’s a long list of them. 

The Funnel Strategy

When coming up with 30 hashtags, the best approach is to use what’s referred to as the “funnel strategy:”

  • 15 – Low Volume Hashtags (Under 100,000 posts)
  • 10 – Medium Volume Hashtags (100,000-1,000,000 posts)
  • 5 – High Volume Hashtags (1,000,000+ posts)


The reason why this strategy is important is how it can create a snowball effect for your posts visibility. If your posts gets exceptional engagement, it can “trend” on specific hashtags. It’s easier to trend to on smaller volume hashtags which then increases the visibility which increases the number of hashtags you can trend on. (I’ve gone viral before, trust me on this) 

DOS-M Category Strategy

In addition to the “funnels strategy,” there are three types of hashtags you should be including on all your posts. These are what I call the DOS-M Category Strategy:

  • Local Hashtags – This is how you get legitimate followers that become clients. These are also how you network with your community! 
  • Descriptive Hashtags – These are how you keep that variety and rotate which hashtags you use
  • Industry Hashtags – These are the most standard hashtags you can come up with, they also tend to be the highest volume.

Sample Post

Let’s pretend we’re a painter in Dayton, OH and this kitchen is what we’re posting. Here is a list of relevant hashtags.

Shoutout to IQ Hashtags for this! 

dos-m social media guide sample post for instagram hashtags

Location Hashtags

#ohio (13.6M)
#daytonohio (537K)
#ohiorealtor (70.9K) 
#daytonoh (61.1K)
#daytonrealtor (22.3K)
#ohiorealtors (11.1K)
#daytonsmallbusiness (5K)
#daytonbusiness (5K)
#ohiointeriordesigner (5K)
#ohiointeriordesign (1K)
#daytonrealtors (1K)
#daytonhomes(1K)
#daytoninteriordesign (1K)
#daytoninteriordesigner (1K)

You can always use other variations of these phrases if they’re being searched frequently enough. I typically only utilize hashtags with 1K+ post volume. 

 

Descriptive Hashtags

#kitchen (31.2M)
#beforeandafter (25.4M)
#renovation (13.9M)
#kitchendesign (12.5 M)
#kitchendecor (4.6M)
#kitchenremodel  (2.2M)
#kitcheninspo (2.1M)
#kitchenrenovation (1.4M)
#houserenovation (1.1M)
#kitchensofinstagram (1.1M)
#kitchenisland (1M)
#renovate (906K)
#kitchenstyle (500K)
#kitchenmakeover (250K)
#bespokekitchen (143.5K)
#beautifulkitchen (93.6K)
#cabinetpainting (71.8K)
#classickitchen (64.1K)

Industry Hashtags

#interiordesign (149.3M)
#painting (148.2M)
#interior (78.4M)
#paint (51.4M)
#painter (14.7M)
#homeimprovement (5.1M)
#homerenovation (4.4M)
#contractor (3.9M)
#homeideas (2.9M) 
#wallpainting (1.8M)
#painters (1.3M)
#paintersofinstagram (1.1M)
#sherwinwilliams (642K)
#paintlife (539K)
#housepainting (324K)
#renovationideas (236K)
#residentialpainting (166K)
#homepainting (152K)

When To Post On Social Media

It depends… There are so many factors in choosing the best time to post so it’s important to TEST, TEST, TEST! However, a good rule of thumb is around 10A.M. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Just don’t post anything late at night on a Sunday and you should be good. 

Low Priority Social Media Platforms

LinkedIn

If you’re really looking to network, this is the best social media platform for it! That’s what LinkedIn is all about. Additionally, it’s a great location to share professional insights about the industry. It’s possible to target a residential market on here but that’s better suited for FB/IG. 

YouTube

This is an excellent social media platform to embrace if you have the bandwidth for it. A hack is to repurpose all your content. If you’re shooting a lot of video content for IG or FB then it makes sense to also post all this content on YouTube. You can also shoot long-format videos specifically for YouTube and then break them apart for other social media accounts.

The best part about YouTube is you can use it to take advantage of SEO. It’s just important you know how to optimize your descriptions, titles, and tags for this. 

TikTok

Unfortunately, this algorithm is different than IG’s so it’s hard to implement any specific strategies at this time. Engaging content is best for this social media profile if you plan to use it but I think it’s pointless since very few target clients are on it. 

Twitter

I mean if you’re bored and have truly nothing better, I guess you can tweet your thoughts and takes on painting? 

Don't Reinvent Social Media

Imitate What Works

I would say look at the franchises, but their social media kind of sucks so it’s an excellent way to compete with them! So my advice is to take inspiration from how Benjamin Moore runs their social media accounts.

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