Social Media
Social Media
A company needs social media channels like Facebook & Instagram because customers are there and where there are customers there is the potential to generate sales leads. In addition, Social Media offers a host of digital marketing opportunities that allow you to engage with customers, advertise to them, and even promote your company. It is another ingredient added to the marketing mix of a company.
Remember your marketing strategy is less a single method and more of a combination of various media outlets. We suggest using multiple marketing methods because each method generates a small number of sales leads. Simply put, the more varying ways you market, the more chances you can reach customers. Reach more customers by having a marketing mix, and social media is only one part of that mix.
In recent years, social media channels have become a standard business practice and no company is too small for them. The customer simply expects a company to have them, and the best companies make sure they are up-to-date and active. An active Social Media channel is one that runs social media posts on a daily to weekly basis, but more on frequency later.
At this point, you need to decide as a business owner if you will personally manage your social media channels or delegate the day-to-day to a staff member. We suggest the latter because as you will soon discover throughout this article, there are a lot of buttons and levers to push and pull.
Delegate or Step Up
We recommend you delegate this task to someone in your company that has a knack for technology, graphics, and ad copy as three skills will be needed to run multiple active social media channels. Sit down with this staff member and decide which channels you will focus on, and more importantly which platforms will you juice with advertising dollars, while all platforms are free, they also include paid services that boost your company’s posts.
The Big Three in SM
There is a variety of Social Media platforms, but the three biggest players according to active users are:
Facebook
Instagram
YouTube*
Everything below this line is far, far smaller in size relative to the other SM.
Other Options:
TikTok*
Twitter
LinkedIn
Instagram
Google My Business (GMB)**
*Since TikTok & YouTube are for videos only, we suggest you establish other platforms because videos are harder to implement and are more time-consuming.
**As for Google My Business, this is technically considered SM, but it is different enough that we have decided to have a separate write-up on the topic.
Therefore, we recommend you start with Facebook and Instagram as they are considered the biggest platforms out there, and your potential clients will likely be on one of the two places.
Now, let’s talk about signing up and then making posts on social media.
Signing Up for Facebook & Instagram Basics:
SM sites make the signup process fairly easy, so we will focus on what you will need to prepare to make the process even easier for you. We will focus on Facebook and Instagram, commonly shortified to FB and Insta.
On Facebook & Instagram, you are creating a business account, not a personal account, so make sure you are picking the right option. Finding the button to create the business page is sometimes tricky, on Facebook, you find it on the login screen while on Instagram you find it in the settings tab at the bottom, allowing you to switch your personal account to a business one.
Gather this information before you create your account:
Select a business email address you wish to use as the main account holder, this email will be used to create the account, log in, and recover or change the password. We do not suggest you use a personal email because it is less secure and already has its footprint all over the internet. You may also want to give multiple employees access to this email address if they are to manage your social media platforms.
Before creating your business page, make sure you have all the information on your company ready:
Company name (Username)
Image of Logo with company name (Profile Photo)
Banner Image (Cover Photo)
Address, email, phone number
Brief description of the company & services
Business Hours
Company Website URL
Go through the onboarding process and fill out your company’s bio on the business page.
Create your first post
Creating Posts
The best posts consist of both an image/video and a caption that gives more details about the image. Posts are essentially promoting your company in an engaging way and finding a balance between informing and selling to customers. If you always outright advertise with your posts, fewer people will follow your channel or just flat-out ignore your posts.
What makes social media vastly different from traditional advertising is that your customers can block you. This means they can never see your posts again by unsubscribing from your feed. With that in mind, you should avoid annoying or offending people by posting something tone-deaf, controversial, or constantly advertising your products/services. Do not spam your subscribers with advertising. Instead, you want your company page to feel useful (or fun) to your clients and leave them with a strong sense of who and what your company is. Think of it as a kind of behind-the-scenes look into your company.
If you need help creating impactful social media ads, then check out our customizable Click & Grab Ads designed to help promote various aspects of your home service company.
Image Sizes
As we said before, the text of a post is only one-half of a Social Media post. The other half is the image uploaded which needs to be a certain pixel dimension.
Depending on what part of the social media platform you are uploading an image file to, the dimensions determine if the image fits into the space provided. If it does not fit the space, the image will get cut or may look off-center, or appear stretched. The given SM platform will automatically adjust the image to fit its location and often leave it looking ugly if it is the wrong size, to begin with. In short, follow this image
Image Sizes
Depending on what part of the social media platform you are uploading an image file to, the dimensions determine if the image fits into the space provided. If it does not fit the space, the image will get cut or may look off-centre. Most times the platform will attempt to adjust the image to fit, but sometimes it simply does not work. Here are some image sizes and where they go:
When you upload an image in the wrong dimensions, the platform resizes the image for you, but it also compresses it causing quality issues like the image appearing grainy, so following the correct sizing ensure a successful post.
Maybe at his point, you are asking yourself, how do you resize images? Well, it can be done with any photo editing software.
Now you have a properly sized image to upload, you need to write the caption that accompanies it, this is where you need a smidge of ad copy skills, but you can likely wing it and come up with something half decent, just make sure everything is spelled correctly.
Let’s look at some important things to consider before you post.
Include A Call To Action
A call to action often called a CTA is the part of the post that asks the reader to act on something contained within your post. For example, a simple call to action is “call for a free quote” or a more subtle one would be “check your AC for signs of wear and tear.” Subtle or obvious, you want a call to action in each post because it increases the odds of a client reaching out to your company.
Posting with Frequency
You do not want your social media pages to be outdated or inactive. If a customer looks up your Facebook page and the last post is from one year ago, this makes the customer think you do not care, are out of business, or they do not notice and are calling you for an offer that expired a long time ago.
Instead, post something at least once a week. It is even possible to schedule a post ahead of time, so you could theoretically prepare an entire month’s worth of posts in a single day and have them automatically post without further input.
Monitoring Analytics
You will find analytics for each post you make, and these numbers can only be seen by the account holder. These tabs track not only a single post, but all analytics over longer different periods of time. Analytics are also organized according to Organic and Paid activity. Organic means the user found one of your posts on their own and paid means the SM platform targeted the user according to your ad specifications.
There are two metrics you look at when evaluating the success of a post, a part of the data is how many people saw it, how many people clicked on it, commented on it, or reacted to it. A react is a ‘Like’ or ‘Emote’ given to the post by a user and perhaps suggests they read your post.
The more people who see your ads, the better demographic data the social media platform can give you. Once you know who is looking at your ads, you can better you can tailor them to your audience in the hope it generates more leads. You can also A/B test certain ad copy and may find one thing works better in your market than another. For example, Save Tax may work better than No Tax.
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