Should Your Business Be on EVERY Social Media Platform?
You may already know what an important role social media plays in the marketing strategy for your business. Building a community around your online presence sets you apart from competitors and generates real leads with paying customers. But should you maximize exposure to your brand by appearing on every social media platform?
Our expert team of social media strategists at VitalStorm make these decisions about the best social media practices to benefit our clients every day. Ultimately, when it comes to social media for the home services industry, quality is more important than quantity.
Successful Posting on Different Platforms
The primary reason that not every business should appear on every branch of social media is because there are different avenues for success across different platforms. Each social media platform has aspects that make it unique, and your posts should reflect that. Think about the way you use each of your personal social media accounts to gain some insight. While Facebook posts are lengthy and in depth, Tweets are short and sweet. Images on Instagram should be high quality photos of personal experiences or products filtered to perfection, whereas pins on Pinterest are often graphics or stock images. Realistically, some social media platforms are better suited to the home services industry than others.
Best Social Media Platforms for Home Service Companies
Even though Instagram and Twitter are two of the most popular social media platforms today, Facebook is by far still the best place for home service companies to grow a base of followers and customers. Twitter can also be an effective platform for sharing tips, fun facts, and other small nuggets of information related to your industry.
Since a steady stream of high quality, original images is hard to come by for home service companies, Instagram is not an ideal platform. Posting poor quality pictures or failing to post new content regularly would be far worse for your brand and business than simply not having an Instagram account at all.
Building Community on Facebook
Using Facebook effectively is essential for your online marketing success. Naturally, Facebook should be a one-stop-shop for information related to your business: your address and contact information, hours, a brief description, and reviews of your service. But it is also so much more than that! Using behind the scenes photos, blog articles about your industry, and relatable/shareable posts for your customer base, you can foster an environment of online engagement that keeps your brand relevant and humanizes it all at the same time. Interacting regularly with customers in the comments is one of the best ways to remind them that your business is not faceless. It adds a more personal, human component to their idea of your brand. (For more on this topic, check out our blog about Brand Storytelling.)
Engaging with Your Industry on Twitter
In order to use Twitter successfully, you should change up your approach and differ your content from Facebook. For one thing, if all of your content is identical across every platform, what incentive is there for people to follow all of your accounts? For another thing, Twitter has a style that is centered around brevity and conversation. On Twitter, you can interact with industry leaders by sharing their content (and if you’re lucky, they might share yours in return and widen your exposure). You can weigh in on trending topics, especially those related to your industry. You can also share helpful facts and tidbits of information that your customers could find useful.
Quality Over Quantity
When it comes to building a dynamic social media strategy, it is always better to focus on creating quality content for a few platforms rather than stretching yourself thin across too many. When you focus on establishing a community amongst your followers using personal connections, your efforts will affirm existing customers and attract new ones.
Our Social Local team at VitalStorm knows the right platforms to use to help your business see results. If you are interested in boosting your social media performance and overall reach, give us a call at 877-311-5695.