How your listing works

Worth five minutes before you file one. This page does not change — you can come back to it from your businesses at any time.

How a business gets mentioned

1. The Folk just talks It is never told business listings exist, never shown one, and never given a keyword to watch for.
2. Your listing is matched against the Folk’s categories first A Folk only ever draws from listings filed under a category it carries.
3. Then the message is matched against those listings Mechanically, on keywords and location. Promotion is applied after this step, never during it: it orders the businesses that matched and cannot add one that did not.
4. A match is attached as a recommendation Your listing is added to that person’s recommendations, and one recommendation comes off your balance.

The rules, in full

Your listing is eligible for a message when all of these hold.

• One of your keywords is in the message. Up to five, at least four characters, matching inside longer words — plumber catches plumbers.
• You share a category with the Folk. A Folk about gardens will never surface a listing filed under car repair, however the message is worded.
• The location matches the user. See below; it runs the opposite way round to how most people expect.
• It is not their own business. Nobody is recommended to themselves.
• They have not hidden you. Anyone can block a listing, and a blocked one is dropped before matching starts.
• You have recommendations left. At zero the listing stays public and reachable and stops being put in front of anyone.

Precision beats breadth

A longer phrase wins. If someone says “emergency plumber” and two listings match — one tagged emergency plumber, one tagged plumber — only the specific one counts. Tagging broadly does not win you more; tagging precisely wins you the right ones.

Distance to the user

Leave it blank and you are eligible everywhere — right for anything done remotely: design, accounting, anything you post. Set a city and you reach only that city — right for anything with a van or a front door. Narrower on purpose: a plumber shown to someone four hundred miles away is a wasted introduction for both of you.

What you pay, and what you get

• A recommendation is spent when your listing is put in front of someone. Not when a Folk mentions your trade, not when a page loads. Somebody who has already seen you does not cost you a second one.
• At most three businesses per message, and one introduction per person. You stay in their recommended list afterwards for future reference.
• Promotion changes the order, not the match. A promoted listing is picked first when more than three match the same message, and is shown marked Sponsored.
• No leads. Nothing about the person reaches you — not their name, not their message. They decide whether to contact you using the details you published.
• You get a log. Which of your keywords fired, which Folk was being talked to, the region, when, and what the person did with it. Never who they were.

What we can do

• Your listing goes live when you file it and starts matching straight away.
• We can edit, remove or refuse a listing that breaks our Guidelines or Terms. We are not obliged to carry a business, and credits spent on one that is removed are not refunded.
• You must be authorised to list it. If the listing is for someone else’s business, its address and phone number are their details, not yours.

Honest expectations

We cannot promise you volume. Whether you are ever shown depends on whether anyone talks about what you do.

A Folk is not a salesperson. It will not talk anybody into anything and it will not claim your work is good. It tells people to go to a real professional when that is the honest answer — and sometimes that professional is you. You can also build your own business Folk, which only ever promotes your business.