Is Your Social Media Presence Helping or Hurting Your Contracting Business?

These days, everything you do with your social media accounts can help or hurt your business. Doing nothing at all can sometimes be as detrimental as making a bad post. But if you’re not a social media expert, it can be difficult to know what you’re supposed to do. Here’s how you can evaluate your social media presence, with tips to avoid creating more problems than you solve.

Rethink Your Posting Frequency
Busy small business owners tend to get stuck in problematic patterns related to social media. Do you find yourself posting regularly for a week, then it tapers off until you’re barely logging in at all? This is fairly common. You make a commitment to get more active to help build your brand. But like going to the gym as a New Year’s resolution, it’s a habit that can be hard to develop. Ask yourself what you want to get from your social media. If it’s greater engagement, you’ll need to find a way to step it up. The last thing you want is to encourage potential customers to check out your social media accounts, when they haven’t been updated in months.

Set Reminders for Account Management
If you’re already on top of your social media posts, then you might think you can safely check out and hope that everything will work according to plan. Relying too much on automated posting services can mean that you’re generating content, but not engaging with anyone who gets drawn in by it. Set reminders to check your social media accounts at least once a week. Avoid the temptation to turn off notifications, even if they are distracting. This will help ensure that you can see what people are doing with your pages and alert you to possible problems as they arise.

Read Reviews
Contracting businesses that interface primarily with consumers instead of businesses often rely on social media as another form of advertising. Reviews are great, but it only takes a few unpleasant ones to make prospective customers feel wary. Keep in mind that customers can leave reviews on sites like Yelp for businesses even if you don’t have a page. This means that if you don’t invest the time to see what’s there, you might be missing a big opportunity. Although it’s easy to get frustrated at low ratings, it’s better to find ways to work around it. Many sites give you the option to provide feedback, which can give better context for others reading it.

Post Responsibly
You may have seen how some large companies have made a new reputation for themselves with snarky or humorous social media posts. Who knew that a dictionary publisher could clap back so well? But for every fast food restaurant Twitter account that’s keeping everyone in stitches as well as sandwiches, there are stacks of businesses hurting their brands with badly-worded or poorly-timed comments. You don’t have to be formal, but it’s always worth considering your audience before you write something a bit out of your professional range. A fun post that goes viral in a good way can dramatically increase your reach. One that irritates hundreds of thousands of people can tank your future clientele.

Know When to Outsource
If this feels like a lot of work, that’s because it often is. Social media sites can be an excellent way to expand your client base without having to invest a lot into marketing. The trouble is that it requires regular attention to be effective and not hurtful. In many cases, it’s better not to have a social media profile than to open one and leave customer questions unanswered. If you’re struggling to find the time or the means to stay on top of it, it might be work outsourcing at least a portion of it. This could range from paying the person who writes your blog posts a little extra to make social media posts, to hiring someone who can completely manage your social media accounts.

Social media can be a boon or a bust for companies, depending on how you manage it. By taking these tips, you can ensure that your contracting business looks its best. To begin building a business that can outlast the latest trends, contact CSLS today!