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Best Practices on Social Media for Home Services Marketing

By Leadhub
Posted on August 25th, 2022
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Running your own home service company’s social media can be a lot – even for the most social savvy business owner. There are so many things to consider when developing your strategy. Here are just a few of the key points to keep in mind.

Know your social audience

There is oftentimes a massive disconnect between your actual business audience and the audience you have on social media. The social platforms will give you some insight into who is following your page – age, gender, location and language spoken. You should never assume your business audience is the same as your social audience.

Several years ago, we onboarded a client that primarily targets women with their traditional advertising efforts. They wanted all their social content to be geared toward women, as well. However, a look at the demo information showed 85% of their audience on the different social platforms was men. It took several months of targeted ad campaigns to finally turn that audience around and build the following they specifically wanted for their content.

Should your home service company be on every platform?

Short answer? No.

One of the most overwhelming parts of trying to manage a social media strategy for your home service company on your own is figuring out where you should focus your efforts. For most businesses, there is no need to be on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok. Managing that on your own is impossible – and most home service companies won’t have the time or content to work on many of those platforms. (One important note: It is important to claim your business handles on the different platforms, but you don’t have to necessarily produce content for them.)

For most home service companies, Facebook is the obvious answer of where to start. Don’t believe the rumors that Facebook is dead. It’s not – but it does have an older audience, which is perfect for most home service companies anyway. The difficult part with Facebook is it’s essentially become a pay-to-play operation. If you don’t have a small promotion budget, no one is going to see your content.

How to promote on a small budget

Here’s the good news. Even though Facebook requires promotion, small businesses can get a good bang for your buck with a small budget. There are two types of promotion to consider – promoted posts and Facebook ads.

With promoted posts, it all depends on the size of your company’s Facebook page. If you have fewer than 5,000 followers, you can likely get the results you’re looking for with $5 of promotion. The bigger your page, the more you will need to spend on promotion – but it stays within reason. Pages up to 15,000 followers can likely get results with $10 of promotion. Saying that, you need to have a solid strategy of what content needs promotion. You don’t need to promote every post. Save it for the posts that you think will spur business – calls to action, sale announcements, links to your website, etc. That picture of your technician in the field is good content, but it doesn’t need to be promoted.

The second type of promotion is running Facebook ads – typically to build your audience. The days of worrying about follower counts are long gone. In fact, paying for an ad to build followers only means you may have to eventually pay more to promote posts in the future. Besides, Facebook (and Twitter) no longer allow us to target homeowners in ads, which is a huge deterrent from running ads.

The right tone to respond to home service reviews

If your business is on Facebook, it’s going to enable reviews. Facebook reviews can have the potential to get really personal, really quickly. Because the reviews are tied to the user’s Facebook account, it can bring in their friends and family to join the conversation. This means your response to home service reviews on Facebook is incredibly important.

Snarky or angry responses, in general, typically do the exact opposite of what a business owner wants. While you think you’re defending your business by going after someone who may be exaggerating the truth or telling a different story than you know happened, another user is going to usually take the side of the customer. That means they’ll assume you’ll come after them if something goes wrong, as well. It’s often best to have multiple people involved in a review response. It’s even better if you can bring in someone not involved in the specific scenario to help craft the response. This will help raise red flags when needed if the tone goes overboard.

Need help with your home service company’s social media strategy? Leadhub is here for you. Contact us today to get a free estimate of how we can help take your business to the next level.

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