How to Choose a Social Media Company for Your Contracting Business: 9 Questions to Ask

Question 1: Who Owns the Content and the Page After You Leave?

Ask this first because it decides how much room you have to negotiate everything else. Some agencies post from their own account structure, or set up your Facebook and Instagram pages under an agency-controlled business manager. Cancel, and you lose admin access, post history, ad account, everything. You are starting over from zero followers with a new logo and a blank feed.

The right setup: your business owns the Meta Business Suite account, your business owns the Instagram handle, your business owns the page. The agency gets added as a partner or admin, not the other way around. If a company hedges on this, or says "it's easier if we just manage it under our account," that is the tell. Easier for them, expensive for you the day you switch.

Ask a second, sharper version of the same question: who owns the raw video and photo files. A shop that shoots your job sites should hand over the raw footage, not just the finished 15-second reel. Raw job-site footage of a roof tear-off, a panel swap, a slab pour has reuse value: website hero clips, before/after pages, future ads. If the contract is silent on file ownership, that footage lives on someone else's hard drive after the relationship ends.

• Get the business manager transfer, the handle, and the raw file ownership written into the proposal, not verbally promised.
• Ask for admin access from day one, not "after onboarding."
• If they will not put ownership in writing, that is your answer regardless of what the sample reel looks like.

This is the single most expensive question on this list to get wrong, because the damage does not show up until you try to leave.

Question 2: Which Platforms Do They Actually Run, and Which Ones Do They Just Mention?

A proposal that lists Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and LinkedIn as "included" usually means one platform gets real attention and the rest get an auto-crossposted afterthought. Ask directly: which platform gets native content shot for it, and which platforms get the leftover clip resized and reposted.

For most trades, Facebook and Instagram carry the weight, since that is where a homeowner is scrolling when a neighbor's before/after post shows up in a local group or a geo-tagged reel surfaces. TikTok and YouTube Shorts matter more for trades with high visual drama (roofing tear-offs, tree removal, epoxy floor transformations) and less for trades that are harder to make visually interesting on a 9-second clip. LinkedIn rarely moves the needle for a residential trade and matters more for commercial-facing contractors chasing GC relationships.

Ask the company to name the one or two platforms they will actually shoot native content for and defend that choice against your trade and your service area, instead of accepting a five-platform checklist that spreads a thin content budget across places it will not be seen.

Questions 3 and 4: How Do You Prove a Post Led to a Call, and What's the Real Ad Spend Markup?

This is where most contractor social contracts fall apart in practice. A company reports "engagement up 40%" or "reach grew" and calls that the deliverable. Engagement and reach are not leads. A contractor does not pay a crew off likes.

Ask for the specific mechanism that connects a post or an ad to a phone call or a form fill. There are a few legitimate ones: call tracking numbers placed in the bio link and in ad creative, separate from the number on your website, so a call from social shows up as social in your call log; UTM-tagged links on any bio link or ad click-through, tied to your analytics, so a form fill can be traced back to the specific post or campaign; and Meta lead-form ads that capture name, phone, and service directly inside the platform, delivered to you in real time, with a monthly count you can compare against jobs booked.

If a company cannot describe one of these mechanisms without you asking, they are not measuring outcomes, they are measuring vanity metrics because vanity metrics always trend up. Ask what a normal month looks like in raw numbers: reach, link clicks, and leads generated, not percentages. A percentage increase off a tiny base sounds impressive and means nothing. Twelve leads in a month is a number you can weigh against a truck roll. "Engagement up 40%" is not, and it also tells you whether paid social is even part of the plan, since organic reach on Facebook business pages has been shrinking for years and most real lead volume from social now comes from a boosted post or a run ad, not an unpaid post sitting in a feed.

Which leads straight into the fourth question: if paid social (Meta ads, boosted posts) is part of the package, ask exactly how the ad budget is billed. There are two numbers in every paid social contract: the media spend that Meta actually keeps for showing the ad, and the management fee the agency charges to run it. Some contracts blend these into one number on purpose, so you cannot tell how much of your "$800 social ad budget" actually reached a screen versus how much was margin. Ask for the split in writing: "Of the monthly ad budget, how much goes to Meta as media spend, and how much is your management fee."

A fair, common structure is a flat management fee on top of a media spend that goes straight into the ad account you can see inside your own Meta Business Suite. An unfair structure is a bundled number with no visibility into the ad account at all, where you have no way to check whether $500 became $500 of actual reach or $300 of reach and $200 of undisclosed markup.

• Ask to see the ad account, not just a screenshot of results.
• Ask whether the ad account is under your business manager (it should be) or theirs.
• Ask what happens to the ad account and its learning data (Meta's algorithm improves with history) if you cancel.

A shop that is comfortable showing you the raw ad account, tied to a real lead-tracking mechanism, has nothing to hide on either question. A shop that only ever shows a PDF full of percentages is worth a harder look before the contract gets signed.

Question 5: How Is Job-Site Content Actually Shot?

This is the trade-specific question a generic agency cannot answer well, because generic agencies are used to restaurants and retail, where content gets shot in a controlled space on a schedule. A contracting job site is none of those things: it is a moving crew, a homeowner's property, weather, and a schedule that shifts by the hour.

Ask how footage actually gets captured. Three common models exist, each with a real tradeoff:

1. Crew self-shot on phones, uploaded to a shared folder or app for the agency to edit. Cheapest, fastest to scale across every job, but quality depends entirely on whether your foreman remembers to hit record before the tear-off starts.
2. Agency visits select job sites on a schedule to shoot with real equipment. Better footage, but limited to the jobs they can physically get to, and it needs coordinating around your crew's timeline, not the agency's.
3. Hybrid: crew shoots raw clips on every job as a habit, agency shoots polished content on flagship jobs periodically. Most workable model for a trade business, since it keeps a content pipeline running even on weeks with no scheduled shoot.

Ask specifically who is responsible for prompting the crew to shoot footage on a normal Tuesday job, not just the photogenic ones. A social calendar with nothing but three showcase projects a quarter runs dry fast. Ask how many total pieces of raw footage they expect from your crew in a normal month, and whether they provide a simple shot list (before, mid-progress, after, one clip of the crew talking) so a foreman with no video training can hand over usable material.

If the answer is vague, "we'll figure it out once we start," that vagueness becomes your problem on month three when the feed goes quiet because nobody owns getting footage off the job site.

Question 6: What Does Reporting Actually Look Like, and How Often?

Ask to see a sample report before signing, not a description of one. A usable monthly report for a contractor answers four questions in plain numbers: how many posts went out, what platforms, how many leads (calls, form fills, DMs that turned into a quote request) came from social specifically, and what the ad spend produced if paid social is running. That is the whole list. Anything beyond that (impressions, reach, follower growth broken out by hour of day) is filler that pads a report without helping you decide whether to keep paying for it.

Ask how the report gets delivered and how often. Monthly is standard. Ask whether there is a call or a written summary attached, or whether it is a dashboard link you are expected to check yourself. Busy owners do not check dashboards. If a company's entire accountability structure is "log in and look," the numbers will not get reviewed and problems will not get caught until a slow quarter forces the question.

• Ask for a sample report from an actual client (names can be redacted) before you sign.
• Ask whether posts and captions get sent for approval before publishing, or published on the agency's judgment. Either can work, but you should know which one you are getting, since a contractor's brand voice and a generic marketing voice read differently to a homeowner who has followed the page for a year.
• Ask what happens when a lead number is flat for a month. A company with a real process has a next step (shift ad spend, change content type, adjust targeting). A company without one just repeats the same plan and hopes.

Reporting is not the deliverable, but it is the only window you get into whether the deliverable is working. A company allergic to specific numbers in a specific report is telling you something about what happens after the contract is signed.

Question 7: Do They Actually Know Your Trade, or Are You the First Contractor They've Signed?

Ask this one directly and listen for specifics, not reassurance. "We work with home service businesses" is not an answer. "We've shot roofing tear-offs and know to get the ladder and the crew in frame before the shingles start flying" is an answer. A company that has actually run social for contractors knows the small, unglamorous realities: crews do not want to stop and perform for a camera, homeowners do not always want their address geo-tagged in a public post, and a rained-out week means no new footage regardless of the content calendar.

Ask what content patterns work for your specific trade and expect a real answer, not a generic template. A roofer's best-performing content usually centers on tear-off and dramatic before/afters. An HVAC company's best content is often less visually dramatic and leans harder on trust signals: a tech explaining a diagnosis on camera, a maintenance tip, a same-day call answered. A landscaping or hardscape crew has built-in transformation content every week. A plumber or electrician has to work harder for visual interest and often does better leaning on educational short-form content than on job-site drama.

• Ask for one or two examples of content ideas specific to your trade, on the spot, not from a deck.
• Ask if they have handled a trade with similar constraints (crew-based, weather-dependent, homeowner properties) even if not your exact trade.
• Be wary of a company that answers every question with the same content strategy regardless of whether you are a roofer or a landscaper. Trade-blind social strategy produces trade-blind results.

This does not mean you need an agency that works only in your one trade. It means you need one that can name the specific differences between what works for your trade and what works for the trade next door, instead of running the same five-post-a-week template across every client on the roster.

Questions 8 and 9: What's the Contract Term, and What's the Real Cost to Cancel?

Ask for the term length and the exit terms before you ask about price, because price without an exit clause is not the real price. Many contractor social media contracts run month-to-month on paper but carry a setup fee, a minimum term, or a clause that reclaims the business manager account on cancellation, effectively locking you in without calling it a lock-in.

Ask these three directly:

• What is the minimum term, and what happens if I cancel before it ends.
• Do I keep the page, the handle, the ad account, and the raw content on cancellation (tie this back to question 1), or does anything revert to the agency.
• Is there a notice period, and is it in writing in the contract, not a verbal "just let us know."

A company confident in its own work generally has no problem with a short minimum term and clean handoff terms, because they expect to keep you on results, not on a contract clause. A company that needs a long lock-in and murky ownership terms to keep clients is telling you, indirectly, what it expects will happen once you are free to leave.

This question matters more for social than for most other marketing spend because social accounts carry history: follower count, post archive, ad account learning data, and the engagement patterns the platform's algorithm uses to decide who sees your next post. A clean contract protects that history as yours. A messy one lets it become the agency's bargaining chip if you ever want to leave.

Last, ask a simple closing question that ties all nine together: "If I cancel tomorrow, what exactly do I walk away with, and what exactly do you keep." A straight, specific answer to that one sentence tells you more about a contractor social media company than the entire sales deck that got you on the call in the first place.