What social media is for
For an established construction, trade or professional business, social media is rarely where clients decide to buy. It is where they keep a business in mind until they need it. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s 95:5 rule suggests that only about 5 per cent of business buyers are in the market at any given time. The other 95 per cent will buy later, and the businesses they remember are the ones that showed up consistently in the meantime.
The audience is there. DataReportal’s Digital 2025 report counted 20.9 million social media user identities in Australia in January 2025, equal to 77.9 per cent of the population. The question is less whether clients use social media than whether a business gives them a reason to remember it.
What to post
It is common for established businesses to post mostly promotions or occasional news, because the real work feels too ordinary to share. In practice, the real work is the most useful content. Finished projects with a sentence on the brief and the result, work in progress, short explanations of how the team solved a problem and the people doing the work all show competence in a way an advertisement cannot.
The diagram on this page shows an illustrated balance. Most posts show work and expertise. Promotion is used sparingly, when there is something genuinely new to say.
| Question | Best for | Typical content |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial, government and professional clients | Projects, expertise and company news | |
| Visual work and local audiences | Finished projects, process and people | |
| Local communities and residential clients | Projects, updates and reviews |
How often, and where
Consistency matters more than volume. Three to five posts a week on one or two channels, sustained for a year, does more than daily posting for a month followed by silence. Choose channels by where clients research suppliers: LinkedIn for commercial, government and professional clients, and Instagram or Facebook for visual work and local audiences.
Make it sustainable
Most social media plans fail because they depend on someone finding time each day. A simple routine works better: capture photos and short videos during normal work, set aside one session a week to prepare posts, and use templates so each post looks like the business. Zelexis plans social media strategy from the brand position, with content pillars, templates and a weekly rhythm built around the time the team actually has.
A useful next step
Something to try this week.
Look through the last three months of your business’s social posts and count how many show finished work with a sentence on the brief or result. If it is fewer than half, plan the next four weeks around three recent projects, each shown as a finished result, a detail and the team behind it.