Gotta be there

Why should your company have a presence on social media? The short answer is because your customers are there. Social media is underutilized in the green industry. This means there is an opportunity for you to get your company in front of more eyes than your competitors. Here are reasons why you need to be marketing your company on social media and tips on how to.

• Social media is localized. You can optimize your content and get your company exposure to people in your target service area.

• Advertising on social media is inexpensive and the local targeting features are fantastic. You can advertise directly to the areas you service or areas you would like to get more business in.

• Enhanced customer service. More and more people are reaching out and contacting companies via social media. Millennials and Gen-Z prefer to contact companies through social media platforms. Companies that aren’t utilizing social media are missing out on business opportunities.

• Social listening opportunities are abundant. What is social listening? It’s just that — listening to conversations on the social media platforms. Listening to what people are saying about your business, your employees and even about your competitors, will provide you with great insight into problems or opportunities for your company.

• Direct engagement. You can directly engage with customers on social media. Engaging with customers and potential customers will help with improving brand reputation and digital word of mouth (people sharing or recommending your company to someone else via a social media platform).

• People are on social media day and night. You can reach your customers via social media anytime you want. At night when people are browsing social media you can interact or showcase content — which will get eyes on your brand and ultimately lead to more lead generation/business opportunities.

Humanizing your Company on Social Media

There’s an old saying in the marketing world — people buy from people. There are several ways you can add human elements to your social media marketing strategy.

1. Social media is about being social. Be sure to engage with people on social media. Engage in community events and news that is being circulated online. Again, social media is about being social — go socialize.

2. Feature feel-good stories. Share positive community news, employee features, employee of the month, company news and other success stories that will drive positive emotion.

3. Encourage employee engagement. Urge your employees to share company posts and engage with company social media posts. It goes a long way when employees are engaging positively with your company. When potential customers see happy employees, it implies quality work.

4. Inside look/behind the scenes. There’s no better way to make your company look human than to show the humans that work there.

5. Create informative content. Creating infographics and other informative content will help build trust, build company credibility and will help educate people. Providing informative and ‘how-to’ type content will not only help people, but it will allow you to connect with them on a personal level because you provided value by helping them. People appreciate when you help them.

6. Put a face to the company. It’s important that leadership is featured regularly on social media. It can be talking about company news, greetings posts (have a great week, happy holidays), and company promotions/deals/offers. Having the owner of the company featured on a short video and saying thank you all for your business and have a great weekend goes a long way.

Where to post

You should have a presence on any social media platform that your target market is on. I know there isn’t enough time in a day to generate quality content for eight to 10 different social platforms. However, there are a couple social media platforms that your business should be on.

Meta/Facebook: There are almost 3 billion Facebook users. Facebook can be a powerful platform for your business. It’s a great platform for promotion and engagement. Most people that live in your service areas have Facebook and are active there. The best type of content for Facebook is inside looks, job showcases, engagement posts, company news, entertainment and community discussions/news.

Instagram: There are 2 billion active users on IG. Just like Facebook, the people that live in the towns you service have and are active on IG. Users typically hop on IG for entertainment and to see what their friends or people that they follow are posting. The type of content that is best for this platform is before-and-after content, completed job images, short videos/reels and entertaining content. Be fun, showcase your company’s personality!

YouTube: There’s a saying in digital marketing — YouTube is the second biggest search engine, second to Google. People go on YouTube to learn about something or to be entertained. How to, inside looks, in field videos (content at jobs), customer testimonials and entertaining videos typically perform the best. For a long time, YouTube was used just for learning about something or how to do something. However, over the last two years, YouTube has become an entertainment platform as well. YouTube “Shorts” are taking off. “Shorts” are short videos of no more than 15 seconds. It’s YouTube’s version of TikTok and IG Reels.

TikTok: TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for people over 30 years old. TikTok is no longer just a bunch of young people doing dances. Older age demographics are now becoming comfortable and are using TikTok. This means that people 30 years and older are now falling down the TikTok content rabbit hole. It is a platform that is used by people primarily for entertainment purposes. If you want to have a successful presence on TikTok you need to produce content that is entertaining.

Post frequency

I recommend posting 3-4 times a week if you can provide relevant, informative, engaging, valuable and quality content. It’s critical that you do not post for the sake of just posting. You should never sacrifice quality for quantity. If your posts are of poor quality, people will think your services will be of poor quality. The 3-4 times a week posting standard applies to pretty much any social media platform.

Once you come up with a content plan, you need to test it. In addition, you need to see what days your posts get the most reach and engagement. When you are trying to figure out your content schedule it’s important to understand the reason why people are on social media. User habits on social media do vary based on the platform the user is on — but at the end of the day, people are on social media to be social.

A big mistake many landscaping companies make is that they sell too much on social media. Most of the time users will scroll or swipe right past your post if you are promoting services. If you want to sell on social media, that’s what their ad platforms are for. Regarding organic posts, you shouldn’t be selling too much.

There are exceptions — if you are offering a promotion or something that will give value to your audience, then that can be something you post about. A good rule of thumb is to use your organic posts for providing relevant, informative, engaging, valuable and quality content. Use social media ads to promote your business/services.

The author is digital marketing manager at Custom Landscaping and Lawn Care in New Jersey.