Audit your own social presence in 20 minutes: the exact procedure, run on 11 New Bedford funeral homes

A funeral home is the least likely business in New Bedford to need a marketing lecture. These are firms that have carried the same family name over the same door for sixty and seventy years, that know which church a family belongs to before anyone says it out loud, and whose reputation was built one Tuesday morning at a time by people who showed up. Nothing on a screen competes with that.

But the way a family finds you has changed, and it changed quietly. Someone's daughter in Boston searches at eleven at night. She lands on your website, then she looks for the thing she looks for on every site: a Facebook link, so she can see whether you are a real place with real people. That single click is the handoff. It is worth measuring.

So here is the whole procedure. Twenty minutes, no software, no invoice. I ran it on eleven funeral homes in and around New Bedford before writing this, and I am publishing exactly what I got, including the part where my own tool was wrong.

What I actually ran, and what came back#

Eleven funeral home websites in New Bedford and the towns that border it. Four of them refused an automated request outright and returned HTTP 403, so I have no measurement for those four and I am not going to invent one. That leaves seven sites I could read.

Two of the seven link to a Facebook page from their website. Zero link to Instagram. Five link to nothing at all.

I want to be precise about what that does and does not mean, because the distinction is the whole point of doing this by hand. It does not mean five New Bedford funeral homes have no Facebook page. Most of them almost certainly do. It means their own website does not tell you where it is. The visitor who came looking for reassurance has to go back to Google and search again, and some of them do not.

The procedure#

Step 1 — Open your own website on your phone. Two minutes.#

Not your desktop. Your phone, on cell data, not the office wifi. Go to your homepage and scroll to the very bottom without tapping anything else.

You are looking for one thing: a Facebook icon. Can you see it? Can you hit it with your thumb on the first try?

Most funeral home sites in this region are built on a template from a national vendor, and the social icons are a checkbox in that vendor's admin panel that somebody never ticked. It is not neglect. Nobody told them it was there.

Step 2 — Tap every social icon you find. Three minutes.#

Tap each one. Write down where it lands. You are checking for three failure modes, in order of how often I find them:

1. The icon goes to the platform's homepage, not your page. A placeholder URL that was never replaced.
2. The icon goes to a page you abandoned in 2019 with a different logo and a phone number that is one digit off.
3. The icon goes nowhere, a 404 or a login wall.

A dead link is worse than no link, because it is the last thing that daughter in Boston sees before she closes the tab.

Step 3 — Search your own name on Facebook. Four minutes.#

Open Facebook, search your firm's full name, and look at every result. Do not stop at the first one.

What you are hunting for is the duplicate. Facebook auto-generates unofficial pages from check-ins and tags, and for a funeral home this happens constantly, because mourners tag the location. You will often find a shadow page with your address, a photo of your building taken by a stranger, no admin, and reviews you have never seen. Families find it and message it, and nobody answers.

If you find one, you can claim or merge it from the page itself. Facebook calls it "Is this your business?" It is free.

Step 4 — Do the same on Google. Four minutes.#

Search your firm's name plus New Bedford. Look at the panel on the right.

For a local business, your Google Business Profile is the most important social channel you have, and almost nobody treats it as one. It has photos, posts, questions, and reviews, and unlike Instagram every one of those is free for you to check and free for you to fix. Confirm three things: the hours are right, the photos are yours and not a stranger's, and every review from the last year has a reply.

Step 5 — Check the reply rate, not the star rating. Four minutes.#

Count your last twenty reviews. Count how many have a response from you.

For most trades I would say reply to everything. For a funeral home the calculus is different and more delicate, because a review of your firm is a family telling a story about the worst week of their life. A short, warm, specific reply signed with a real name is worth more here than anywhere else, and a wall of unanswered five-star reviews reads as absence.

Step 6 — Write down the one gap that matters. Three minutes.#

You now have a list. Fix one thing. Almost always it is the same thing: put the Facebook link back on the website.

The part where my tool was wrong#

I run this with a script as well as by hand, and on the first pass the script told me that two of the seven funeral homes had an X account. They do not. Neither of them has ever had one.

The pattern it uses to find X profiles was written as (twitter|x)\.com/, and both of those sites embed a map on their contact page. That map loads from api.mapbox.com. The last two characters before .com in "mapbox" are an x and nothing else, so the pattern matched the map and reported it as a social account.

I fixed it, and the corrected count is what you see above: zero. But I am telling you about it because it is the strongest argument I can make for doing the twenty minutes yourself. An automated audit that hands you a number you did not watch it produce is a confident stranger telling you about your own business. Two of seven, in this run, was a map.

What a New Bedford funeral home should do on Monday#

In order, cheapest first.

Every item on that list is free and every one of them is yours to do. Nothing on it requires hiring anybody, including me.

The one to do first is the footer link. It is ten minutes, and it is the difference between that daughter in Boston finding forty photographs of your chapel and finding a dead end.

If you run the twenty minutes and something does not add up, or you get into your site's admin panel and the social fields are not where the vendor's help doc says they are, call me and I will tell you where to look. That part is free too.

Joshua Amado, Avalon Partner. 774.559.8992 · Joshua.Amado@AvalonPartner.com

What I could not measure: four of the eleven sites refused the automated request, so they are absent from every count above rather than scored as zero. Facebook and Instagram profile existence cannot be verified server-side at all, which is why steps 3 and 4 are manual. Follower counts and post cadence are not obtainable without either the paid platform APIs or your own access tokens, and I do not have those for anyone but my own clients. None of the firms are named, here or anywhere.