A study by small business insurer Markel Direct has found that 84% of the UK tradespeople and small businesses it surveyed generate at least some of their work through social media. The survey covered 501 UK small businesses and tradespeople and asked how they use social platforms to market themselves.
The numbers
- 84% said social media generates at least some business.
- 29% — almost three in ten — estimated that 10-19% of their work comes directly from social media activity.
- 59% said their social presence has helped increase sales or generate leads, and lead generation is now the primary objective for 33% of small business owners using social.
- 76% spend time every week creating or editing content, and 54% spend between one and three hours a week on it.
- 69% have never paid anyone to create content for them, and 65% have had no formal social media training.
What that actually says about the trade
The headline is that social media has become a mainstream route to work for UK trades. The more interesting finding is the last pair: two-thirds are doing this with no training and no outside help, on top of a full working week.
One to three hours a week is not a trivial commitment for a sole trader. Priced at even a modest hourly rate, a couple of hours of content work per week is real money, and it is unpaid time competing directly with quoting, invoicing and chasing materials. The 29% attributing 10-19% of their work to social suggests the return is real, but it is worth being clear that this is self-reported attribution — most sole traders have no way of knowing whether a caller found them on Instagram, a directory, or a neighbour's recommendation.
Practical read for a small trade business
The finding that matters is not "you must be on social media." It is that most people doing it are doing it untrained and unsupported, which is where the wasted hours go. Two things follow:
- Attribution beats volume. Asking every enquiry where they found you takes ten seconds and tells you within a couple of months whether the two hours a week is buying anything. Without that, you are guessing.
- Finished work is the content. For trades, before-and-after photographs of completed jobs consistently outperform anything requiring production effort, which is fortunate given that nobody surveyed has time to make anything else.
One caveat on the study itself: it was commissioned by an insurer with a small business customer base, and 501 respondents is a modest sample across a wide mix of trades and non-trade small businesses. Treat the direction as sound and the precise percentages as indicative.
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