Your dead social media account is costing you work

Here’s a mistake I see constantly with local businesses on the Fylde coast. They set up a Facebook page or an Instagram account a few years back, posted a handful of times, then let it go quiet. It’s been sat there gathering dust ever since.

And I understand why. Most tradespeople look at social media and think, quite reasonably, that nobody is desperate to follow Bob the plumber. You’re not trying to be an influencer. You’re trying to fix boilers.

But in 2026 there’s a completely different reason to keep those accounts alive, and it’s got nothing to do with followers. It’s proof of life.

What happens after AI recommends you

Picture how someone finds you now.

They ask an AI who they should get to sort their guttering in Cleveleys. The AI names a few businesses, and yours is one of them. Brilliant. Job done?

Not quite. Because what happens next is the bit most businesses never think about.

They go and check you out

Nobody hires a stranger on an AI’s say-so. The first thing they do is search your name. They look at your website. They read your reviews. And they click on your social accounts.

That’s the moment of truth. If your Facebook page’s most recent post is from 2023, what does that tell them?

It doesn’t say “this business doesn’t do social media.” It says “is this business still going?” A dead feed reads as a dead business. You’ve just been recommended, and then you’ve talked them out of it without saying a word.

This is the part that turns it from a nice-to-have into something urgent.

Google has started pulling recent social media posts directly onto Google Business Profiles. Not links to your accounts. Actual post thumbnails, surfacing on your listing, right next to your reviews and photos.

It’s a staged rollout, so it isn’t live for every business or every category yet. But it’s real, it’s happening now, and the direction of travel is obvious.

Think about what that means

Your Business Profile is your shop window. It’s the first thing a customer sees when they search for you, and for a lot of local businesses it’s more important than the website.

Google is now hanging your social feed in that window. Whatever’s there, that’s what people see.

So if your last post was a Christmas message from two years ago, that’s what’s on display. If your page is really a personal account with holiday snaps and opinions on it, that’s what a customer sees while they’re deciding whether to ring you about an emergency leak.

Google didn’t ask permission. It just started doing it.

What to actually post

The good news is the bar is low. You are not competing for likes. You’re proving you exist and you’re working.

Keep it simple and keep it regular

Show the work. Before and after photos of jobs you’ve done. This is the single best content a trade can post, and you’re already taking the photos.
Show the place. A job in Lytham, a job in Poulton. Naming the town does double duty, it looks local to a human and reads as local to a machine. (It’s the same service-plus-town logic behind letting Google tell you which keywords to target on the profile itself.)
Keep it recent. Consistency beats effort here. A quick photo every week is worth far more than one polished campaign every six months.
Answer the questions you get asked. Whatever customers ring you up about, that’s a post.

What to leave out

Now that this feed can end up on your Google listing, it needs to look like a business, not a personal page.

So skip the motivational quotes, the Friday memes, and the political opinions. Skip the “we’re hiring” banners, which just confuse a customer looking to buy. And be careful with old promotions, because a two-year-old summer offer resurfacing on your profile in the middle of winter makes you look asleep at the wheel.

Every post is now worth a quick test. If a stranger searching for your service saw this as their first impression of your business, would it make them more likely to call, or less?

A word on what this does and doesn’t do

I’ll be straight with you, because that’s how we work.

Linking your social accounts and posting regularly will not, on its own, shoot you up the local map pack. There’s no good evidence that social signals are a direct ranking factor, and anyone telling you otherwise is overselling.

What it does do is make your listing convert. A profile that looks alive gets the click, and the click becomes the call. And that behaviour, people choosing you over the other three in the map pack, is very much something Google notices.

So it’s not a ranking hack. It’s a trust signal, at the exact moment someone is deciding whether you’re a real, active, going concern. Which, when an AI has just recommended you and sent them off to check, is the moment that matters most. That same customer is reading your reviews and your profile’s own description in the same breath, so it pays to have all three telling the one confident story.

And if you want to go a step further and actually measure which of your posts are pulling people in from search, Google just handed us the data to do exactly that.

Bring it back to life

If your accounts have been quiet for a year, don’t overthink the relaunch. You don’t need a strategy document or a content calendar. (And if you’d rather it just ticked over without you thinking about it, that’s the sort of thing we handle on a monthly plan.)

Take a photo of the job you finished this week. Say what it was and where it was. Post it. Do the same next week.

That’s it. That’s proof of life. And in 2026, proof of life is worth more than followers.

Want us to keep your social channels and your Google profile working together? Get your free audit and I’ll tell you straight what your listing looks like to a customer right now, or book a call if you’d rather talk it through. It’s the sort of thing our local SEO work is built around. Either way you’re dealing with me, and I read every message myself, so drop me a line at hello@inkon.co.uk.