PACE covers one piece of social media for local service businesses: what each goal does, how to weigh them for your business, and how to check your last twenty posts against the result.
Why format is the wrong starting point
Most planning conversations are about format: more Reels, or another before-and-after. But all format decides is how a post gets made, not what it’s for. The same material can serve any of the four goals depending on what you build around it.
A photo of a finished project gets attention from people who have never heard of you. Put the customer’s own words beside it and the same photo becomes evidence of your credibility.
Starting from format produces a month of content where every post does the same job. A feed of only before-and-afters reaches new people and never asks them for anything. A feed of only offers asks strangers for engagement they have no reason to give yet.
Content allocation is the alternative: deciding before the month starts how many posts go to each goal.
What each PACE goal does
Each goal has a test that separates it from the one next to it. A single post can look like it fits two or three of them, and the tests are what tell you which one you actually made.
Attract
Attract posts are built for people who have never heard of you. The test is who the post makes sense to. If it only lands with people who already follow the page, it isn’t Attract.
Owners tend to reach for trending audio here. Trends can help, but a post travels because the work in it is worth looking at. A pressure washing company posting a driveway halfway through a clean, shot from the street a neighbor would recognize, does that without any audio at all.
Attract shows up in reach, in impressions from people who don’t follow the account, and in shares.
Educate
Educate posts show that you know your trade. You are the one talking here, in your own voice, about how the work gets done. That is what separates Educate from Prove, where somebody outside the business does the talking.
An owner explaining on camera why a roof gets a soft wash instead of a pressure washer is Educate content. So is a blog post, at greater length, and the same material moves between the two formats, though blog posts cited by AI search follow a few rules a caption doesn’t.
The numbers that show it working are saves, profile visits, and questions arriving in comments or by DM.
Prove
Prove posts let somebody else vouch for you. Educate is you talking about your work. Prove is a customer, a review, or a number doing it for you.
These two get confused more often than any other pair, which at worst produces a post where a business praises its own work and calls it a testimonial. A screenshot of a review that names your crew clears the bar. So does a finished job with the homeowner’s own words attached.
Prove earns DMs, link clicks, and comments asking about results.
Convert
Convert is the only one of the four that asks for something: a call, a form, or a booking. One ask per post.
It works because the other three built the trust first, which is also why you should use it least often. A seasonal service announcing that its booking window opens on a stated date is a Convert post.
For Convert, the numbers to watch are link clicks, form submissions, and calls.
How to determine your content allocation
There is no default allocation that works for every business. The right mix depends on where you are currently struggling, and every allocation Posted Social builds for a client starts by identifying that bottleneck and weighting the month to clear it.
Four situations cover most local service businesses.
If nobody has heard of you yet, whether you’re new, new to a city, or new to a service line, most of the month goes to Attract. Convert stays at a minimum, since few people book an appointment with a business they have only just heard of.
When the phone isn’t ringing enough, the gap is usually in showing what you can do. Educate and Prove carry the month while Attract keeps new people arriving. Convert can sit higher here than in any other situation, since the people seeing it already know who they are dealing with.
Hesitation is the most common case for contractors, home services, and healthcare. Big-ticket jobs that take real time and money give people plenty of reasons to wait, so Educate and Prove take priority, because reassurance is what moves someone off the fence.
Once you’re established and your reputation is the main selling point, most of the month goes to Educate and Convert stays scarce on purpose. Your feed’s job at that point is holding that standard in plain view.
Three rules hold across all four. Convert always stays under 20% of the month in every one of them. Nothing sits at zero for long, since a month with no Prove is a month with no outside voice in it. And the split has to match what you can actually produce: if nobody will go on camera or sit for an interview, Educate can’t be your biggest slice no matter what the strategy says.
How to check your recent posts
The check takes about ten minutes and it settles most arguments about what your feed is missing. Pull up your last twenty posts and label each one with a single letter: A, E, P, or C. A post that could be two gets the letter you built it for rather than the one it happened to serve. Then count the four piles.
The count usually reads one of four ways. Mostly Attract says your feed reaches new people who are never given a reason to stay or a chance to buy. Educate with no Prove means you’re vouching for yourself with nobody else to confirm it. A heavy Convert count means an uninterested audience is constantly being asked for engagement. No Convert at all leaves an interested audience that’s never given the opportunity to engage.
Counting posts tells you what your feed was built to do. Whether it worked is a separate question, and it’s the one social media analytics for small businesses is built to answer.
What comes next
The count comes before the calendar, since a gap has to be named before a month can be built to close it. Ten minutes with your last twenty posts is enough to name it.
There is more to each of the four goals than a definition and an example, and each one gets its own post later. So does the Narrative Anchor, the through-line Posted Social requires on every account it runs.
Posted Social builds these allocations for the accounts it manages, through social media management and content production. PACE sits alongside platform choice, posting cadence, and the rest of what goes into social media for local service businesses.