You, your business and Social Media

[David Hammond]

How important is social media to your business?

Reasonably important. My socials aren’t there to “sell”, but I do keep them updated. Customers are nosey and will do some research.

I’ve won jobs where customers have seen we’ve done work for other similar companies “if you’re working for them you must be ok”.

You can make yourself look busy, so when your quote is a little bit more expensive, customers think “well others are paying it” similarly you can show some if the process, cutting, weeding, machinery, suddenly it’s not just stickers on van or board.

Do you believe that creating good content helps your business or is it waste of time?

Good content, yes, just posting photos of ‘heres a window sticker’, ‘heres a van’, find out why customers choose you and push those points, to attract more similar customers.

Do you believe that posting your projects on social platforms can help your opposition to steal your clients?

I’ve a customer who many years ago never had sign written Van’s, but would follow his competitors who had signed vans around, and poach their customers. It happened before social media.

If you’ve got a good relationship, deliver quality, service and value I dont think you’ve anything to fear. I’ve a customer who went to a cheaper company, but wants to take advantage of the fact we store artwork etc, and tried to get the stock image off us. Needless to say they get their Van’s cheaper, but missing the critical element.

In short have a plan, a target audience, and a clear message.

[Robert Lambie]

1, How important is social media to your business?
2, Do you believe that creating good content helps your business or is it a waste of time?
3, Do you believe that posting your projects on social platforms can help your opposition to steal your clients?

1, How important is social media to your business?
In all honesty, Social media enquiries tend to be a waste of time and those that are genuine, have a low-value expectation of what to pay because they have seen all the “Buy 5 banners for £100” or “Neon is so cheap because it is this easy to make” type of promotional “social network” posts.

2, Do you believe that creating good content helps your business or is it a waste of time?
Yes, by all means, create a network of Social sites connected to your company. Occasionally upload photos and videos of your work. Use each of the platforms as a type of online Gallery of what do and offer as a sign business. This network of “social blogging” platforms you have created for your business is generally picked up by Google etc, and of course, those that search from within the social sites themselves will also pull up your content.

3, Do you believe that posting your projects on social platforms can help your opposition to steal your clients?
This happens to everyone from time to time. But what you need to understand is the companies that do this are either threatened by you or have no work of their own and are sitting wondering to themselves, “I will your target customers, finish your company and fix my business!” 😏

If their FOCUS is on your customers and what you are doing, it’s a signal they are struggling. just continue doing what you are doing and let them slip down the big slippy slope! 😉
Keep in mind, it is not rocket science to just visit your website to see your work. does this mean you are now also going to stop posting your customers and jobs in fear the cowboy will come there too?

As you haven’t asked, you may already know this.
Social media sites such as Facebook etc. will only show your unpaid content to around 5% of your actual “like, followers”.
i.e.
if you have 1000 followers, then around 50 of those 1000 people are shown your new content. 🙄
If you post regular content and interact with your users on a daily basis, the views of your content will reach around 100 people of your 1000 “like, followers”. 😏
The only real solution to getting the numbers up on a business page is to PAY Facebook and co. to present to the same audience you have worked so hard to create and build. At this point, your then “paying per view”. so let’s say you pay £20, which may get you 2000 views of your post. this could be 1000 of your “like, followers” and 1000 random people based on what preferences you have selected.
Again, “engagement” is key, when you want post impressions to work “as they really should” but keep in mind, social sites have lost tons of revenue and credibility due to their ever-changing algorithms, increasing costs and more.
For me, I sometimes think it would just be easier throwing £20 quid here and there at random posts you make “when you have time”. at least the volume of people will still get to see it and hope you may generate some free engagement in the process.
Alternatively, turn to someone with a background in social media development and let them do all the work across the platforms. Unfortunately, this doesn’t guarantee you anything and if it’s a third party, you often have to review all the content and work with them until they fully understand your business. Like everything, Time = Money. and you still have the same upward battle for followers, impressions, content etc.

if you do go down the route of registering on sites such as:
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube etc.
To help lower your leg-work, register your pages and use a social sharing platform like HootSuite or similar.
sites like Hootsuite allow you to make a post on a single platform and it sends the post to “all your social media sites” at the same time. it also allows you to send them at scheduled times of the day and many other features.
(i am only using Hootsuite as an example) there are a good few and some with free-to-use options.

[David McDonald]

Hi Pane

1, How important is social media to your business?

Not huge but still significant enough to spend time and thought on. Its just part of a well rounded approach to marketing (I’m told). When potential customers are searching for us they’ll find us everywhere they look, Google shows search results including things found on Social Media, including images, and reviews. Some customers only search for suppliers on media. It shows we are busy and and our service is in demand, and its a quick and easy way sometimes of showing something current. I think the danger is you can spend too much time on it though. For one specific category of client we get the biggest percentage of their enquiries via Social Media, some other client categories we get zero.

2, Do you believe that creating good content helps your business or is it a waste of time?

Yes, 100% and we need to do more. Google likes continual updates of unique and authoritative content. Its like a snowball – keep adding more and more and it will get found, linked, shared, quoted and referred to. If you author something then its not just for social media – stick a version on Facebook, LinkedIn, another blog version on your website, even on YouTube etc. etc.

3, Do you believe that posting your projects on social platforms can help your opposition to steal your clients?

Yes suppose it can happen but only as much as posting a gallery of work on your website and you have to show your work, we don’t worry about it. We follow lots of our competitors on social media and look at their websites, (and I know many keep up to date on us) – its interesting to see who’s doing what, and even get inspiration if they’ve done a good job, or of course criticise heavily if they haven’t 🙂 We don’t steal clients but its really good to be knowledgeable on your local industry to be competitive when selling.

Cheers

Dave

[David Hammond]

Interstingly, I’ve done the opposite @David-McDonald

I don’t follow any local companies on my personal social media, in fact I don’t really use social media personally other than LinkedIn.

I’m now a one man band, but from what I’ve seen of other small businesses they spend far too much time concentrating on others, what the competition are doing, how cheap companies are doing stuff. Rather than investing time in their own business.

Some of the things I’ve introduced similar smaller companies haven’t, they like the idea, but can’t actually be bothered to spend the time doing it.

[Simon Worrall]

Meh

[Jamie Wood]

😄 Me too.

[Karen White]

I have Facebook and Twitter, but i very seldom update them. I know I really should, but working on my own it is not a priority for me. any inquiries I have got over the years have been “tyre kickers” I think the term is! 🤨🤣

❤

[Chris Wilson]

We use Instagram and Facebook.

Facebook 1-2 posts a month. Lots of photos. Good work = good response. We get a lot of messages through it. Quite often I’ll put in the text – that’s us fully booked till June or whatever and it removes the surprise when customer gets in touch as they already know.

Instagram I fire up little clips every day. Doesn’t generate mass enquires, but it does connect us to our customer base. They see various stages of the job and it becomes more friendly with the messages. Bit of crack.

Also it’s a banging place to send new customers. We only keep good stuff on there. Quite often when quoting I’ll drop the link so customer can have a look through.

Don’t bother with offers really.

We did have another local firm get Instagram a few years back that start following all our customers. So I returned the favour then blocked them. So they can’t see a thing.

We also have yell.com pay £180 a month for the privilege of keeping local competition off the top spot. More fool me

[Hugh Potter]

we’re on fb, twitter and insta. Predominantly we use insta with the posts linking through to fb and twitter is I choose.

I don’t bother with paid promotions, I use it more as an online portfolio where people can view our work, see a bit about who we are / what we do in and out of work. Most of the things I get tagged in on FB will politely be declined as they’re too small a job or, more likely, they usually get posted on a wednesday and are asking “can someone recommend a sign co to wrap my van by friday afternoon” in which case I explain that we’re booked for at least a month ahead with wraps and part wraps [as we need 2-4 consecutive days where the fitting bay is not already booked for an install of one type or another,] in order to book them.

Twitter I generally avoid as it’s full of self important types who just make me go “full troll” within 3 minutes of opening the app.

Facebook just (largely) full of people wanting the cheapest deal, or the job done last week, or free designs, etc. no time for that!

[Pane Talev]

Thank you all for your reply.

To be honest, I’m doing social media because “google spiders” like it, apparently.

Nothing matches pay per click advert that I pay directly to google.

[Robert Lambie]

I have too many negative views on social media to enjoy doing it. The Google ranking benefits are what pushed me to make more effort. So I agree with you there, Pane.