It’s 2020 and time to get on board with social media to promote your contracting business if you haven’t already. Here are some tips to up your social media game this year. 

• Post on Instagram and Facebook – Post significant pictures or videos that you would like to have posterity on your Instagram and Facebook feeds. On Instagram and Facebook, make sure that you have Business profiles so you can edit them to include your phone number, email, and website so it’s easy for people to get in touch with you.

• Use Instagram Stories to Connect – Instagram Stories provide a way to keep in touch with your followers and post content multiple times per day without clogging up your actual Instagram feed. Stories expire after 24 hours, and you can post to your Facebook Story at the same time if your Instagram and Facebook Business profiles are connected. You can also experiment with going Live on Instagram and/or Facebook to connect with your followers in real-time. If you have a lot of homeowners following you, try holding a live Q&A and answering their questions. Of course, showing your progress on a jobsite is always great content and appreciated by homeowners and other contractors alike.
• Run Facebook and Instagram ads – There are many different interests and categories of people you can target on Facebook and Instagram through ads, including homeowners. You can run a “Page Likes” campaign, which is meant to get you more likes, or you can run a targeted ad campaign directing people to your website. There are other ad format options, such as contact forms. You can use either a video or pictures as the content for your ad, and write ad copy along with it.
  
  
• Try Tik Tok – Tik Tok is a relatively new social media platform that focuses on video content set to music––it used to be Musical.ly. But some people use it in different ways and because it’s still relatively new, there’s an opportunity to have a breakthrough moment on there and connect with homeowners. Although the audience on Tik Tok skews younger, older generations have recently caught on and there are even notable creators in their 80’s and 90’s! Record the process of refinishing a floor, set it to music, and you’ve got a potential hit. Tip: try tagging it with the #oddlysatisfying hashtag.
  
• Give reddit a shot – Try answering questions from homeowners posting on this forum-based website to demonstrate your expertise. Be careful to not promote your business outright, or you could get banned in certain subreddits (reddit communities)––just try to be helpful.
• Struggling with scheduling? We get it, you’re already busy and have little time left to worry about something as seemingly trivial as social media. Try a scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Buffer, which can help you schedule posts ahead of time. That way, you can work in batches and take care of your social media posts across various platforms all at once. Although these tools will take care of your Instagram and Facebook feeds, we still recommend going into your accounts and posting stories at least once per day to increase and maintain engagement with other accounts.

The number one common denominator of success with all these social media platforms is to consistently create quality content and engage with other people, especially your followers. They’re social networks, meant to connect people.