Social media is a tricky beast to tackle when running any business, be they digital marketing agencies like Framework Marketing or smaller construction brands. That doesn’t make it any less important to utilise as a way of increasing traffic, reaching out to new customers and earning more revenue. For many, social media is seen as a secondary platform you can choose to use if you really have the time or if you want to reach those youngsters who are glued to their phones 24/7.
With this in mind, I’d like to start this Framework digital marketing blog post with a quick myth-busting session. Firstly, whilst social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram don’t exist specifically for your construction brand, they do have plenty of features that make reaching a larger audience much more of a possibility than a company website alone.
When considering social media platforms, think of them as either a second website or a large extension to your existing site. If your website is the shop window to your construction brand, then social media is the garden out back that nurtures social bonds between you and your customers. Whilst a well-designed website can gain traffic and attract good leads to your business, the social media platforms will make that process infinitely easier for both you and your customer.
Secondly, it is a wild myth that it is just young people using social media. Yes, there are apps like TikTok that resonate best with younger people like Gen Z, but the other platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have far wider user bases. In fact, many young people are starting to turn away from Facebook for the more multi-media centric apps like Snapchat and Instagram.
Read more: Marketing in the Weird New World of TikTok and Video Sharing
Replace “young people are glued to social media” with “people are glued to social media” and not only would you have a more accurate statement but a important business revelation – that social media is an ocean of opportunity, if you know how to use it well.
Learning how to use social media is a simple matter of time and practice. You’re not going to gain immediate traffic from one pretty picture of your freshly baked goods or hot-off-the-press sticker collection, but over time and with careful consideration of your target audience you will gain a following worthy of your business.
But simply learning social media is just half of the story. Learning how to use it effectively, efficiently, and in a way that doesn’t become a detriment or strain on the rest of your business pursuits is the rest of it, and there are companies out there that know that that part of the process is the hardest which is why they create beautifully simple tools that can become a blessing in disguise for improving the equally significant minutiae of social media. Here are just a few of the dozens of social media marketing tools that exist out there.
Note: These won’t replace the time and energy needed to create a cultivate a solid social media marketing strategy but they at the very least allow you to take your feet off of some of the pedals required to keep your social media machine (and your construction business!) chugging along.
RafflePress – Contest/Giveaway Tool
Running a giveaway on your social media is a great way to boost traffic, engagement and conversions. Social media users and people in general enjoy the idea of receiving things for free and a giveaway that is well thought through and has good incentives and rewards is destined to go viral.
RafflePress is a feature rich WordPress plugin that allows you to grow email lists, website traffic, and social media followers through its online giveaways. It allows digital marketers and construction companies to create fun online contests and giveaways for online audiences, making it extremely handy for social media marketing.
It hosts a range of features to encourage participation within its giveaways such as extra content entries for performing specific actions, these include:
- Following on social media
- Viewing a video
- Visiting a YouTube channel
- Sharing the giveaway on social media
All of these can help boost social media following and engagement in order to drive more traffic, grow email lists, and increase sales. Its user-friendly interface such as its drag-and-drop builder lets users create giveaways and contests quickly, and its live preview feature allows for changes to be made in real-time.
Growing a social media following is a slow and arduous process, but with the social entry actions on RafflePress it allows for easy 1-click entries to follow your construction company on all the main social accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.
To increase users’ chance of winning giveaways, RafflePress also gives the option of making specific actions more important and valuable than other, making it worth more entries and therefore more attractive to potential participants. These high value actions can range from following to liking and sharing, increasing the chance of more people seeing it and the chance of leads being generated for your construction company.
Amongst its variety of features and uses, one of the most interesting things about RafflePress is that you can use it for free. With the Lite version, you have access to the tools needed to create the successful giveaways in WordPress without spending anything, but with the premium version you get more benefits that will allow you to take full advantage of social media giveaways.
Smash Balloon – Social feed embedding
As mentioned earlier, your social media should be seen as an extension to your construction brand’s website, and to make this a reality you can embed your social media feeds into your website. This will allows users to seamlessly switch between interacting with your website to your social feed and back without issue.
Embedding social feeds straight onto your site is beneficial for those that arrive there first and not from your socials who might not even know that your social media exists. By embedding them straight there onto your site, you can encourage them to follow you and interact with your brand there.
Social feeds onsite also have the added benefit of building social proof to the users on your site that other people trust your construction brand. Once they see that other users are interacting and enjoying your brand, they will be encouraged to become loyal customers themselves.
AgoraPulse – Social media integration
For the construction brands that have more than one site to keep on top of, it can be a nightmare to then worry about all the social media obligations that come with them all. Fortunately, sites like AgoraPulse exist to gather several social media sites together in one comprehensive location so that they can be tackled in a much more concise and efficient manner.
Instead of posting the same post on each of your social media feeds, you can simply select or deselect the platforms you want to post on and they will all post on one integrated platform. Framework Marketing’s sister site, Design & Build UK, uses AgoraPulse to schedule its daily news posts and ensure they never miss a post for their scheduled times.
Read more: Digital Marketing & Social Media
As you see above, AgoraPulse also shows you what the post will look like on each feed that you’ve selected so there is no guesswork as to what your posts are going to look like and you have one less thing to worry about.
Away from social media scheduling, though, and AgoraPulse also allows you to see who is mentioning your construction brand on each social platform so you can interact with them
As you can see, managing social media doesn’t have to be as difficult and time-consuming as it once was. With help from some very simple tools, construction brands can more easily take a step into the digital realm of marketing themselves.
For everything else, make sure you check out Framework Marketing. From brand awareness and website design, to content creation and social media marketing, we can help you expand your construction brand. Interested? Get in touch here.
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