SOCIAL MEDIA
Digital Marketing for a Home Service Business
Social media embraces new ways of communicating with your customers. It can increase the brand awareness of your company. Below is a series of articles about how to manage your social media.
Social Media Articles
Social Media How To
Home Services Business Social Media
Social media is the latest electronic communication method. The Internet started with email and other technologies like Gopher and Usenet. The World Wide Web improved the Internet by offering an easy way to display text and graphics. The web has continued to change and allowed entire platform to be built on top of it. These are social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. It is kind of ironic that these are becoming more and more closed platforms where people just send their time on there much like people did with AOL and CompuServe back in the day. Nevertheless, social media networks are where people spend their time and thus is where your audience for your services and products are.
Determine where your potential audience is
One of the first steps is to determine which social media network your audience is using. There are so many to choose form. Also, the definition of what a social media network is changing but typically involves the creating and sharing of information. The information is user generated and includes profiles of the users. There is usually a connection component.
Here is the list of the most popular social media networks:
- YouTube
- Tumblr
These are the most popular but there are other ones and new ones being created all the time. You can’t be activity on all of them nor should you try. You should figure out where your potential audience and if your product or service may appeal to them on a social media network. For example, if you don’t have items or services that can be communicated easily, a platform like Instagram, which is all about images, might not be a good fit. If your audience is working professionals, then LinkedIn is a perfect match.
Here are two approaches you should take. If you can video a match between where your audience is at and a specific social media network, you should target that social media network. If there isn’t a match, you should target a few of the most popular social media networks to see where you can create connections to your audience.
Setup accounts and standardize profiles
Once you have the match between your audience and social media network, the next step is to setup your accounts. Even if you are going to target a specific network, you should create accounts at the most popular networks to reserve your business or brand name. We suggest creating accounts at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Facebook and LinkedIn require you to use your personal profiles to then create a Facebook Page or LinkedIn Company Page. The others can be general to your business. You should create another email account before setting up these accounts to make it easier to separate the email communication from the social media networks and if you want someone else in your company to manage the accounts. Finally, during setup, you will have the option to create a name. Try to match them to your business name but also try to match them so they are the same across all of the social media networks.
Once you have the accounts created, the next step is to standardize the profiles. All will have an option for an image that should be your company logo. Many also have the option for a header image. Try to find one image that represents your company though the size of the image will be different across the different social media networks. Most social media networks offer a short “bio” section but some offer a larger description. These should be filled out with the same text to again make everything standardized across your social media accounts.
Determine content strategy
With your social media accounts created, the next step is to determine your content strategy. Content refers to the text, images, videos and other things you may want to post on social media. Some social media networks allow you to post many different types of content while others are predominately one type of content like videos on YouTube. Unlink a personal social media account where you might post a picture of your family vacation or what you are eating, a business social media presence needs a different approach.
Since your want to use social media for networking, you would think your approach would be to send posts trying to sell your services or products. However, people would find this content appealing and won’t follow you. The point of social media isn’t to advertise like a commercial on TV. It is to connect with people and share information that is either informative or entertaining. Direct sales pitches are neither. So, the majority of your content should to be informative or entertaining or both. A few sales pitches are fine.
Many of the social media networks use something called a “hashtag”. This is usually prefixed with the pound “#” symbol. So, a hashtag might be “#digitalmarketing”. Hashtags allow topics of similar nature to be grouped together. Your content strategy should also include a hashtags strategy so your content might be found by people other than your followers.
Post regularly
Most social media network present their information is a never ending scroll of information based on the time and date the post was created. So, after a while, a post is so far down the list that it probably won’t be found. So, you need to post on a regular basis so that new content is always visible to your followers.
The frequency of your posts depends on many factors. If you are industry that is constantly changing, daily posts probably are best. Otherwise, once a week, might be fine. A lot depends on the content you are posting. The key is to pick a schedule and stay with it. If you look at someone’s social media account and the last post was 6 months ago, you develop an opinion about the company.
Summary about Social Media
Social media is a new communication method that allows you to speak and interact directly with people. The first step is to determine which social media network your target audience may be using. Then, setup social media accounts and standardize the profiles. Next, determine your content strategy and start to post regularly. Social media is becoming the next communication platform to change the world and provides you with opportunities to promote your business by sharing information.
HOME SERVICES BUSINESS SOCIAL MEDIA VIDEO
Digital Marketing Extreme is your source for digital marketing tips and techniques for your home service business.
Why do you need social media for your home service business? This video will go over what is social media, examples, social media strategy and creating accounts.
If you would like the video slides as a PDF, click to download “Home Services Business Social Media“.
SOCIAL MEDIA VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
This video will go over social media for small business. The agenda for this video is First we’ll talk about what is social media, we’ll give some examples of different social media, talk about social media strategy. And then we’ll finally talk about actually how to create the accounts.
What is Social Media
So what is social media? Social media is a new, newer internet phenomenon that’s been very popular recently. It’s basically the idea of these communities of people who are sharing different forms of content, whether that’s text videos, pictures, and things like that. Um, there’s a new concept within social media that hasn’t existed before with the concept of followers, people who want to follow a specific social media account, and some form of like, or like, you know, liking things through different methods. But in the end, it’s really actually a new way of communication that hasn’t existed previous You see that the internet and other internet technologies have allowed.
For business, it’s actually the chance to an opportunity to actually humanize your business, you can actually directly interact with your customers using social media, there’s a chance to raise your brand awareness by another method of promoting your businesses through different social networks. And ultimately, depending on how you do it, you can actually try to have people come back to your website where you can have the full range of features to demonstrate your products and services, as opposed to trying to do those within the social media platforms where you may not have all the features available depending on the different platform.
Examples
So let’s look at some examples of social media networks versus Facebook. It’s a community of friends and friends and quotes because you could basically friend anyone, but that was its original intent that it would be a very close knit network of your friends. The like feature was started with Facebook. And again, the idea is that you could click a button and like something to show that your preference to the person who was posting it. Facebook’s works on a concept of what’s called the newsfeed which is a continuous scrolling thing of different information that’s being sent to you. You post on to the news feed information, again, text, graphics, videos, many, many different things. Facebook has tried to branch out into other organizing methods. One of these is groups. So again, people who have a shared interest would actually join a group and then have you know, potential communities of people who like that topic.
And other social media network is Twitter. Twitter is actually micro blogging. Again, the concept of blogging is that it’s a place where you would post information in a chronological order, Twitter on A hand unlike normal blogging, which doesn’t have a limitation is limited to 140 characters though Twitter changes that from time to time. But again, the concept is it’s a smaller number. Twitter also originated the concept of the hashtag, which is the pound symbol on your keyboard, the symbol above the three. And these are to help kind of organize into categories, different tweets or posts. Twitter also has the option of retweeting basically sharing someone else’s tweet or again, post.
Instagram is another social network that’s predominantly around the idea of sharing photos, though they have since brought down into videos. Part of that chain of photos was the fact that you’re actually taking them with your phone. Hence the ability of a true kind of social, excuse me mobile, social network, you would take a picture, apply a filter and then share it with your Friends, they to also use the concept of hashtags. But since it is a predominantly a photo sharing thing, the designers of Instagram actually did not give you many options to link outside of the platform. Facebook and Twitter do allow links. So again, it keeps it pretty pure in the sense of wanting to stay with a photo sharing.
Another social media network is actually LinkedIn, this one’s actually much more business focused. It’s really a way on your profile where you in effect, create a electronic resume. And instead of having friends, you have connections. Again, people treat it more as a business focus thing. It does, again, have the concept of groups and where to Facebook where these are places where people can share or can get around a single topic.
Social Media Strategy
So let’s talk about social media strategy. One of the things about social media that immediately is different than other forms of community You really need to find your voice. What are you trying to project whether this is personal. But of course, in our case, more thinking of a business perspective, what’s your voice that you’re actually trying to communicate? Each social media network may have a different vibe. So your voice may need to change for that. But as a small business, the key is to actually think about picking which social media network your customers are there, you don’t have to be on all of them. You could, but it’s really thinking of where your customers are. And each social media network has different demographics that are avail that are out there. So you need to think of that as you pick which networks to be on.
Social media is very heavily into images, you definitely can write text, but images is where a lot of these where they share again, Facebook pictures, your friends and family and pads. Twitter is actually a little heavier on text. Instagram is completely about images and LinkedIn Kind of just, you know, has both of them. The other thing to be aware of is in your strategy is hashtags. And this is again to help for discovery. But also some way you can do some your own branding, if you can come up with unique x taste and might relate to your brand.
Social media because the content continually goes through a chronological order. Old information is very hard, if even possible to discover. So you do want to have a posting regularly. So you’re always at the top for your followers. And this also means that you’re posting much more frequently and much more changing of your content. So it’s very important within your strategy to think about a calendar, what are you posting when you’re posting it? What are you posting, and really be consistent to always be posting something so that your followers can develop like a nature figure out when you are on social media, so they have more reason to again follow you.
Create Accounts
Next let’s talk about creating social media accounts. Each social network social media network has different ways to go about creating accounts. But there are some very common things across all the accounts. First is as a business using the idea of your logo. Most of the social networks started out as personal cell though, they really wanted people to put their pictures so that object is your picture is a great place to put your logo. They do allow descriptions. Some are very small, like a Twitter and Instagram, Facebook is actually much broader. LinkedIn is too. So think about the description of your business you want to put there. And then again, each of them have their own specific configurations. Facebook, if you go with an idea of a Facebook page, a lot of information there, Twitter has a few. LinkedIn actually allows you to do a company page so you have a lot more options there.
Conclusions about Social Media
So conclusions on social media. Major benefits of social media is it is a new way communication methods. So, unlike some of the traditional digital marketing ones like a website, it does allow you to have much more interaction directly with your customers because you can talk to them. It is another way to raise your brand awareness. People may not be looking for you specifically, but maybe they find some information about you which put your brand in their mind. Or again, you can drive traffic. It is a way to humanize your company. Because again, people respond back and forth. And if you’re part of those threads, you actually can be talking with your customers as customer service or potential customers as in generating some leads. And then the benefits are you can have another way to drive traffic back to your website where again, you can do much more things to look at getting leads and Eventually sales and things like that.
