The Organic Social Playbook for Home Services

This week, I sat down with Jackie Benjamin, owner of We Assist Marketing, a social media agency focused on the trades: HVAC, plumbing, remodeling, and other home service businesses. Jackie and I are alumni of the same college, which made for a fun connection before we got into it.

What sets We Assist Marketing apart from a typical social media manager is that they do not just create captions, graphics, and posts. They also handle outbound engagement, reaching out to referral partners, commenting, following, and DMing other local businesses on behalf of their clients to build relationships that turn into work.

We covered how Jackie builds tiers of local businesses worth engaging with, why Facebook still wins despite everyone claiming to hate it, how she built AI bots that simulate her clients’ customers before anything gets posted, and why five minutes of daily engagement can move the needle more than people expect.

The Key Takeaways

Below are the most essential insights from my conversation with Jackie that you can apply to your home services business today.

1. Outbound Engagement Is the Layer Most Social Media Managers Skip

We Assist Marketing does the traditional work of writing captions, designing graphics, and scheduling posts, plus answering comments and DMs. But Jackie says the piece that has actually moved the needle for clients is reaching out to other businesses on social media: following them, liking their content, commenting, and occasionally sending a DM to introduce the partnership opportunity.

“We’re actually reaching out to other businesses who might be referral partners, collaboration partners, potentially just other places where the community might see our clients. That’s really where we’ve seen some movement of the business for our clients.”

— Jackie Benjamin

2. Two Tiers of Targets: Referral Partners and Shared Audiences

Jackie’s team first identifies local businesses that could directly refer work, like plumbers or electricians for an HVAC client. Then they look for adjacent businesses, such as orthodontists or dentists, whose audience overlaps with the client’s ideal customer, so engaging with their content puts the client’s name in front of the same people.

“We really start focusing again on that local area. The first businesses we start focusing on are the ones that could possibly pull them into a job. And then we start looking at the other local businesses that might have people in our demographics as their clients.”

— Jackie Benjamin

3. Activity Is the Real Filter, Not Just Relevance

Before her team follows or engages with any account, they check whether it is actually active. Following a dormant business page wastes effort because there is no content to comment on and no audience actively watching, so activity level is as important a criterion as industry fit or geography.

“Part of it is we don’t want to just start following accounts that aren’t active, right? That was not going to help us at all because we want to be actively engaging with them. So we need them to be active.”

— Jackie Benjamin

4. Educational Content Consistently Outperforms

Team and owner content tends to do well, and a little personality or humor helps too. But Jackie says the posts that perform month after month, whether as video, carousel, or a static graphic, are the educational ones. Her team mixes education with personality-driven content to cover both bases.

“When we’re looking at the content of it, the posts that do well month after month for us are the educational posts. We try to do a mix of those types so we can educate our clients’ customers, but also show your personality side.”

— Jackie Benjamin

5. Facebook Still Wins, But Instagram Is Rising Fast

Jackie calls it an unpopular answer, but Facebook remains the most used and engaged platform for local business audiences, even though people claim not to like it. Instagram is closing the gap and has become especially important now that Instagram captions and posts are being indexed by search engines like Google and Bing, meaning content can be discovered by people who are not even on Instagram.

“This is an unpopular answer, but Facebook is still the number one used, engaged with. Although people don’t want to do it, people say they don’t like it, it’s still time after time. Instagram captions and posts are now being indexed by search engines.”

— Jackie Benjamin

6. She Built AI Bots That Simulate Her Clients’ Customers

Before posting anything, Jackie’s team runs content through custom bots she built in ChatGPT, and now Team GPT, that simulate how a client’s actual customers in their area and demographic would respond. That gives her a read on engagement and reaction before a post ever goes live, while human judgment still guides comments and DMs since relationship building matters too much to automate.

“I’ve created bots that simulate our clients’ clients. Before we post anything for our clients, we’re running it through these bots and saying, hey, how would one of your customers respond to this? Would they engage with it? What do they think of it?”

— Jackie Benjamin

7. Ads and Organic Are a Time Versus Money Tradeoff

Jackie runs paid ads for some clients and sees them as effective, but only with a real budget behind them, since a small ad spend rarely produces results. Organic engagement can be just as effective if you have the time to invest, since it builds long term relationships with clients and collaboration partners rather than delivering the faster wins ads provide.

“If you have time to wait it out, organic can be just as effective, if not more so, depending on how you’re doing it and if you’re doing engagement, building relationships. Your ads are going to be your quicker wins.”

— Jackie Benjamin

Looking Ahead

Jackie’s advice for owners who feel overwhelmed by the idea of adding engagement on top of posting is to start small. She encourages just five interactions a day, following five accounts and spending about fifteen minutes, rather than treating outbound social as another full time job. Small, consistent effort compounds into the referral relationships that actually drive business.

“I just encourage people to do five a day. Interact with five accounts a day, that’s all. It doesn’t have to be hours of your time. Take fifteen minutes and go follow five accounts a day, and you’ll be surprised at how that builds.”

— Jackie Benjamin