WHEN DOROTHY BANDIER hired Olivia Tiedemann to be her family's private chef in 2023, she had no idea a future star was moving into her Southampton, New York, home.

It was a dream job for Tiedemann, now 29. After years of working in fast-paced restaurants, she spent the summer cooking whatever she wanted in Bandier's tastefully appointed kitchen with essentially an unlimited budget. Then, Bandier and her husband went to Europe for two weeks.

"Miss Olivia got bored," says Bandier. "She texted me and said, 'Do you mind if I'm videoing in your kitchen?'?"

When Tiedemann posted clips on social media of her whipping up seafood pastas and searing rib-eyes, she became an overnight sensation, as much for her bawdy, uninhibited personality as her culinary prowess. Sometimes, she greeted her viewers with a hearty, "Good morning, motherf-ers." Within three months, she'd gone from a couple of thousand Instagram followers to more than two million. Now she has about 4.3 million.

Tiedemann's reach became apparent to her employer when Bandier's son, who was living abroad at the time, texted his parents. "My friends are saying that there's this hot chef on Instagram, and they think that she's in our kitchen," Bandier recalls him saying. "So, who is that?"

The field of lifestyle influencers-which can describe anyone from a teen with a ring light to a Kardashian-has become increasingly crowded, making it harder to stand out and, in turn, make money. Enter skilled technical professionals and tradespeople. Following a playbook pioneered by private chefs and interior designers-some of the first types to break out across social media platforms-plumbers, contractors, pool guys and landscape designers have become Instagram- and TikTok-famous.

These professionals essentially operate as their own media companies, says Mariam Rastegar, a partner at talent management company Range Media Partners. "They aren't chasing vanity metrics or trying to get famous for the sake of it; they're using content as a highly strategic tool." In July, Netflix announced a new video podcast with Meredith Hayden, a former private chef who jump-started a genre of Hamptons seasonal workers on TikTok with her Wishbone Kitchen account in 2022.

Seventy-three percent of small-business owners now identify as content creators, according to a June report by Constant Contact, a digital-marketing platform for small businesses. Social media serves as their all-in-one portfolio, marketing strategy and client acquisition tool. Followers appreciate that their content is more educational or inspirational than an unboxing video or #sponcon post-and the way that it can sometimes scratch a voyeuristic itch. Fascination with how the wealthy live is as intense as ever, and these creators' videos are often shot in and around clients' homes.

This can create both opportunity and tension.

TYLER FARRELL, president and founder of custom-home builders Killowen Construction outside Park City, Utah, says the 402,000 accounts that follow his company on Instagram aren't seeing some of the best luxury homes in his company's portfolio.

"We can't show half our work," says Farrell, who adds that a number of those projects are guarded by nondisclosure agreements. He says he has a few clients who are so secretive, he doesn't know their real identity; they use aliases on the paperwork.

What performs best online is not always aligned with the client's preferences. Farrell, 46, was once doing a job in a "really high-end" community that doesn't allow Instagram posts. That day, he'd built a safety rail-a temporary rail on a staircase before the permanent one is ready-that he felt particularly proud of and posted a video showing only the rail. He felt that his audience, which includes a lot of young builders, would appreciate the otherwise-niche content. A resident saw the video and sent the developer over to reprimand Farrell. "He came all the way down, saying, 'Get that off there,'?" recalls Farrell, who quickly removed the post.

Still, Instagram is great for business. Farrell remembers the reaction he had the first time a client told him they found him on social media. "I'm not saying you shouldn't trust me," he remembers thinking. "But you trust me to build an $8 million house based on this app?" Rates vary per project, but Farrell says he's generally been able to raise what he charges as his social media following has grown.

While some professionals include terms permitting them to capture and post content in their contracts, Farrell does not. "We don't have anything in our contract forcing the issue regarding posting our work," he says.

The landscape designer Sebastian Trujillo negotiated an informal agreement to share content on the job after being hired by filmmaker Fabiola Beracasa Beckman to work on her Greenwich Village townhouse. Beracasa Beckman brought him in to finish a project designed by famed landscape architect Miranda Brooks, which he now maintains and adds personal touches to. He'd wanted to post some shots of the work for the tens of thousands who follow his In Situ Garden Design Instagram account.

"We discussed what was off-limits and what wasn't," says Beracasa Beckman, whose home was also featured in Architectural Digest. "I think that Sebastian has a very tasteful approach," she adds, explaining that his posts "showcase more of his talent and less of my home."

Trujillo, 26, says he once had a client in Connecticut who essentially told him, "Feel free to post whatever you want, but please do not mention our names or what we do." A couple of weeks later, one of the client's teenage children commented on a video Trujillo shared of the property, "That's my house!" Trujillo wasn't sure how to handle it. "I was like, What do I do? They haven't mentioned anything." The comment hasn't been deleted.

Meredith Feurtado, another of Trujillo's clients, says she never really noticed him shooting content of her garden in Connecticut since he does it all on his phone. Once while scrolling, she stopped to admire pictures of a garden on her feed. "I was like, Oh, my gosh, that's so pretty; and then I was like, Wait, that's mine," says the retired lawyer, who adds that she didn't have privacy concerns because Trujillo's posts never identified her.

Potential clients sometimes ask Trujillo for discounts in exchange for the ability to post. "It's tough because at the end of the day, you hire me because of my quality work," he says. "Then they're like, 'But my project's going to be so cool, you're going to be so proud.'?"

Jacqueline Whitmore, a business etiquette expert and author, says that while the dynamics around shooting content in another person's home are unique, the best practices are straightforward. Protecting other people's privacy is most important. "Etiquette is all about being considerate of your surroundings and the people around you," she says.

CONSUMERS TODAY are more likely to use social media than search engines to discover small businesses, according to media analysis. David Coleman, a plumber and mechanic whose more than 2.5 million TikTok followers know him as @Mechanicallyincleyend, uses social media for the opposite reason: He wants to make himself obsolete. "I realized homeowners wanted to learn themselves, and that's how I started to grow the channel," says the 36-year-old. "I have too much work. I don't want anyone else calling for something that they could do themselves."

Even though Coleman sometimes showcases customers' grossest problems, he's never heard from a client who was unhappy with a post. Not even when showing how someone clogged their pipes by putting a ton of uncooked rice down their garbage disposal, or speculating that a different client with a backed-up drain could be defecating in the shower. (Coleman says that the latter post wasn't meant to be taken totally literally: "It's just sort of a funny thing that goes viral on social media.")

Keegan McManus, 28, spent nine months balancing morning classes at culinary school with his corporate job before he was able to pursue his dream of becoming a chef. His early private clients were sometimes a bit reluctant to let him record, which he never did without permission. Now that his following has grown, he says, they're overwhelmingly excited. "When I ask, they're almost confused in a way that they think, 'I hope you record. You better record,'" says McManus, who calls himself the Happy Chef on Instagram, where he has around 249,000 followers. Many-especially those celebrating bachelorettes, baby showers and bridal showers-want to be in the video.

Skilled professionals turned creators often don't aspire to switch to full-time influencing. "I'm genuinely passionate about my job," says Jamie Gibson, a 33-year-old flight attendant and chef on private jets who goes by @flightess on Instagram and runs a training platform under the same name. "When you move fully into influencing, your metric of success becomes getting attention," adds Gibson. She once filmed herself plating an elaborate dessert-a petit gâteau in the shape of a Christmas ornament from the Miami bakery Bachour-only to have it slip off her spatula and break. She posted the clip anyway, and the video got eight million views. "What that tells me is that people are drawn to the imperfect, the car-crash moment," she says. "But I think it's dangerous to let likes become your currency when you're running a professional business account."

WHEN TIEDEMANN, the Southampton private chef, first showed Bandier the videos she'd been shooting in her home, she was nervous. "I had basically been cosplaying as an angel in their house for the last three or four months, pretending that I was perfect," Tiedemann says. But in her videos, she adds, she had "a very bad mouth" and had been "giving everybody the finger. I was really scared."

Bandier's verdict? "That was hilarious."