Seven searches that look like they should find home care clients online, what each one actually returns, and the handful that find real families. Tested from a licensed Florida agency, on my own accounts, at my own cost.
I have run a home care agency. Like you, I was told a hundred times that there are families on Facebook and Nextdoor looking for exactly what we do, and that finding them is easy.
Some of that is true. Most of what you will be told about how to do it is not, and I found that out by spending months running searches that returned nothing. This page is the list of what came back empty, so you do not have to repeat it.
There is nothing to sign up for here and I am not going to email you unless you write to me first.
Every one of these looks correct. Every one of them returns something other than a family who needs care.
They ask for a grab bar. Somebody paying to make a bathroom safe is about six weeks ahead of somebody typing "home care agency", and because a contractor has to physically turn up, that person is almost always genuinely local.
The rule underneath all three: short, concrete, uncommon words find people. "Grab bars" works because nobody types those two words about anything else.
That is the default, it is not shown to you prominently, and it is the reason your searches keep returning towns you have never heard of. Set the distance filter once to the number of miles that actually covers your licensed area and no more. Everything you thought was a bad platform was a bad setting.
Public commenting and the Message button on a profile may both be blocked, and the block fires before you have typed a word. Messages started from your Chats inbox usually still work, but only for people inside your own neighborhood range. If someone does not appear when you search to start a chat, they are unreachable. Let them go rather than chasing them onto another platform.
A group with twenty thousand members and ninety posts a day and no comments is a firehose where everything scrolls past unread. Before you join anything, open it and look at the comment counts on the last ten posts. That one number tells you more than the member count ever will.
Done properly, this channel finds one or two genuinely reachable local families a week. Not a day.
Most of what looks promising turns out to be out of your area, unreachable, or already handled by somebody else. Days that produce nothing are normal and are not evidence that you are doing it wrong. The channels that produce real volume in home care are still relationships with assisted living, hospital and rehab discharge planners, and your own personal network, and those run on a sixty to ninety day clock. Online scanning supplements them. It does not replace them.
Anyone selling you a different number about this is selling you something.
This page tells you which searches waste the afternoon. The kit runs the ones that work every morning and drafts the message for you to send. $29, and a 30 day refund with no questions.
Two things worth saying plainly. Never treat somebody's health as a targeting signal — if a post mentions a diagnosis or a hospital stay only to explain a different request, that is not a lead, and people remember who sold into those threads. And whatever your state requires on your license number in advertising, find out before you post anything publicly. Mine requires it in every advertisement, with a fine per offense. Yours may differ.
Written by Laura Martis, who built and ran a licensed non-medical home care agency in Florida. If something here does not match what you are seeing, write to me and tell me — I would rather fix this page than be right about it.