You probably have heard right now that you should be using social media. Perhaps you have tried to use it but are not getting results? Or maybe you don’t know where to even begin.
In this article, I will discuss :
- What Social Media Platform Should You Focus On?
- Being The Face Of Your Company
- How To Organise Your Social Media
Although Facebook has over two billion users, I know plenty of people who detest it. Not just Facebook, but rather social media altogether. Social media is one of the most powerful ways of creating an online brand; if you don’t use it, you are putting your business at a huge disadvantage. This is where your clients will be hanging out socially, consuming information in their private time or at work, and this is where much of their research is done before they purchase a product or service. You need to be in that space to have a chance of getting in front of your clients. If you’re not there, your competitors certainly will be.
What Social Media Platform Should You Focus On?
That will depend on what you’re offering and who you are targeting. Each platform performs differently depending on your client. Where are your clients hanging out? For example
LinkedIn – With my construction company we targeted architects and other professionals through LinkedIn. LinkedIn is generally viewed as more professional, so it makes sense to use this for your architects, surveyors or whoever in your sector has a professional type of work profile.
Facebook – On the other hand, to target our ideal clients, which for us was family homeowners, we used Facebook. We used Facebook for advertising and sharing interesting blogs or vlogs to try and generate engagement, as well as before and after photos, often accompanied by case studies and/or testimonials. If you are targeting your local area have you joined the local community groups on Facebook. Often this is the first place people turn to for recommendations for a tradesman.
Instagram and Pinterest are primarily visual platforms, so we used these to showcase our finished products, refurbishments, extensions, kitchens and so on.
Being The Face Of Your Company
When posting on social media, it is important not to be cold and just show products and services etc to look ‘professional.’ People buy from people and that is still the case even on social media.
Vlogs are a great way to get your personality across. People get to see who is running things, which increases trust. Try to get your personality out there by creating videos, Visual Branding and personal blogs – you’ll be amazed at the leads it can generate. Another platform to try is Twitter. Twitter has a limited word count so often, short phrases and sentences reminding people of what challenges or customer problems you are solving can be enough to attract interest. It is also possible to upload and tweet images with captions. Influencers are very proactive on Twitter so if you want to be an influencer in your industry then you must be there and present. Use relevant and also trending hashtags for more people to see your posts.
How To Organise Your Social Media
With all the platforms mentioned above, you need followers to see your content. Resist the temptation to pay companies for a quick boost in followers, as these schemes are often worthless. They promise a thousand followers within a week, but these won’t be relevant to you and you won’t get many leads.
Unfortunately, slow and steady wins the race when trying to gain followers, so just persist in following relevant people in your industry in the hope that they follow you back. If you take an active role by commenting, liking and retweeting, or sharing their posts, you’ll find that they do the same for you as a courtesy. It doesn’t take too long to build up a decent and, most importantly, relevant following. The point is, you need to set yourself up on the main social media platforms and use them to their full advantage by getting your personality across. Remember, you represent your company’s core values, so get out there and show people who you are.
Where most people fall down with social media is struggling to generate content. This can be a challenge at first, especially if you want to post something every day. The good news is, you can repeat a lot of your content and pictures, but you still need to get organised and prepare at least some content to get you through a month. One thing worth doing is getting a thirty-day content calendar together.
Sit down for a few hours and write content for a whole thirty days (sometimes just a few sentences) for one of your social media platforms. It’s quite easy to then use software like Hootsuite to automatically post that content across all your social media channels.
If you write an article share it 5-6 times over a 6-month period. Don’t just post it once. This way you will have content to share but also more people will see your content. Remember when you share a post on Facebook less than 10% of your page followers will be shown that post so it is important to keep getting your content out there. (Plus, it saves you times that having to write several blog articles a week)
Once you’ve got a month’s worth of content together, try to be more specific with what you post to each channel, bearing in mind the comments in the last chapter. Your message on LinkedIn targeting professionals will likely be different from the message on Facebook targeting homeowners. Their problems will be different, so your message needs to adapt accordingly. You should also work hard to build up a portfolio of pictures that you can use and, if necessary, get some stock pictures to include in blogs and articles. There are lots of companies out there providing free or cheap stock pictures for the construction industry. It’s much better to use your own if you can, though, as you can often tell when an image is stock. Remember to use your USP as content.
One thing I often see in construction is they take a picture of a beautifully finished refurbishment, but they still have buckets and tools in the image, causing it to look unprofessional.
Write articles about what your clients’ problems or fears are and how your service solves or alleviates them. As we said, this talks to your potential clients on an emotional level and can be very powerful. File away all your reviews and testimonials and use these as content.
Reviews are crucial, as we all use them to make purchase decisions. Whether it’s eBay or Amazon, we are conditioned to look at reviews before we buy. It gives you peace of mind when you see a company has four- or five-star reviews, and you begin to trust them. If they have no reviews, or very few, you’ll already be suspicious. Make sure you get your clients to post reviews across social media, any trade body websites you belong to, and of course on Google. I recently wrote an article about this https://developcoaching.com.au/how-to-get-good-reviews/
The beauty in all of the above is that it’s free. Social media is free marketing. It does take time, but it’s essential in today’s world. People will expect you to be in this space and if a client sees that you have followers, post regular content and have good reviews, you will have already eased their concerns and selling to them will prove much easier. Further, the true power of social media can extend even beyond this – this is where it starts to cost money. In the upcoming weeks, I will discuss paid advertising on Social Media.
Conclusion
Times have changed and to keep in and on top of the game, you need to be using Social Media and using it well.
