A good social media strategy can have many positive effects on your marketing, including:
Social media accounts are a direct representation of your business and the quality of your work. Although it requires considerable efforts, it is important to present your business properly on social media. With a well-thought-out branding strategy and proper planning, you can reap many benefits.
This guide will take you by the hand and show you everything you have to pay attention to, to build a solid social media presence for your business.
Social media allows you to build a brand around your business and showcase your work across networks. It is an easy way to convey your message and your ambitions. It can help you create a valuable connection to your past and potential customers. Before getting started or when revamping your social media, it is important to be clear about the following:
Knowing the profile of your target audience is vital in a good social media strategy. It allows for more precise targeting and higher conversion rates. What are their interests? What social media networks are they the most active on? By finding these intersection points between their social media behaviour and yours, you can make sure you are speaking to the right people.
The users aren't the same for each social network and they won't be looking for the same content on each platform. Thus your business does not need to be on every social site, in fact, it shouldn't. You should rather handpick where you are guaranteed the most face time with your target audience for the effort you put in. For example, Snapchat is almost irrelevant for you as a developer, as their audience is predominantly below the age of 25.
Below, I've listed some of the most relevant social media platforms and why they might be interesting for you.
Facebook exposes your business to the largest possible audience worldwide. The average user spends 20 minutes on Facebook a day, in which you can quickly garner their attention with some creative content. Beyond that, Facebook Analytics is a great tool to plan your marketing strategy. You will have access to data points, such as the demographics and behaviour of your followers. It also allows you to build custom audiences to target with your ads. We put together a guide to help you along with creating your first Facebook ads.
With 500 million users, Linkedin is the biggest professional network. Whilst Linkedin definitely offers a better platform for B2B marketing than other social networks, it is just as good for B2C marketing. If you are looking to target professionals you are more likely to find their attention here. A Linkedin business profile provides you with much of the same data as other social networks do: the engagement of your individual posts, trends across key metrics, follower demographics and sources, and traffic and activity on your page. Here you can find a few tips from us on how you can make the most out of your LinkedIn business page.
The lifespan of a tweet isn't longer than an hour, but Twitter offers a quick and easy way of engaging with your followers and target audience through hashtags. This is especially useful to stay connected with the local community of one of your development projects.Twitter Analytics offers a wide range of metrics concerning your followers, the performance of your tweets and profile, but also allows you some insight on upcoming trends. Twitter gives you statistics on upcoming events or holidays, such as the number of mentions by gender or age. However, Twitter has a few disadvantages you need to consider in your digital marketing. With the mass of tweets, engagement on a single tweet can be low and a considerable amount of the accounts are bots generating spam.
Youtube is the biggest video sharing platform. You should consider that consumers are four times more likely to pay attention to a video than to any other kind of post. Not to forget, videos are powerful tools when it comes to telling a story and creating emotions in your marketing. Youtube collects an incredible amount of data on your videos and the followers of your channel. Besides the usual metrics, you will also be provided with information such as the number of views or time watched on average. The great advertising opportunities are definitely worth looking into when you have qualitative video content of your development to share.
On Instagram, you are limited to only sharing visual content such as pictures, videos or stories. This makes it the ideal place to share any visuals or videos of your development projects and their surrounding neighbourhood. With a business profile, you will be provided with the same valuable metrics as on Facebook. In fact, you can also manage your ads over Facebook's Ad Manager. The insights are especially useful for planning what to post and what to promote, especially with the help of the feature lookalike audiences.
On Pinterest you can visually pin content you like onto your board, whilst you browse the boards and content other people share. Pinterest is a valuable marketing tool because of how frequently it is used by consumers to plan their purchases. Pinterest offers the same marketing features as other social networks, but they have quite a few different pin formats, which might be of interest to you.
To successfully build your brand on social media, you need to be committed to posting content, which aligns itself with your message, regularly. Planning content is important in order to be consistent. Tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite can help you schedule content upfront for all of your social media. There are a few things you should keep in mind when planning and posting content.
You don't have to post on each social network daily but it is important to keep on posting. The lifetime of a tweet is an hour, so you should be sending out between 3-7 tweets a day. Facebook and LinkedIn require a few posts a week; Instagram at least one picture a day.
You can recycle some content if you don't have a lot going on that you can share. And you don't always have to share content you created, you can also share news article relevant to your development projects, their location or their history. This also helps with engaging and reaching people who don't follow you yet.
Make sure to post qualitative content. Avoid grammar and spelling mistakes, or blurry or unflattering pictures. It doesn't hurt to touch up some pictures if you can, after all visually pleasing content will be more likely to catch the attention of your audience. Also good to know is that some platforms, like LinkedIn for example, require specific image sizes (1200x628) or else the picture will be automatically cropped by Linkedin when you post it.
When posting don't forget to take advantage of all the media available to you. Tweets with pictures are 150% more likely to be retweeted than tweets without. Four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about something than having to read about it. Video content made up about 74% of all internet traffic in 2017. Reading up about what has proven successful in social media marketing, will help your content strategy a long way.
Make sure what you post is relevant to your audience. At Drawbotics we like to share a variation of our work, company news and industry insights. As a developer, you do not have to limit yourself to sharing information about your development projects. You can also share content about architecture, news or history connected with your projects; or perhaps something about the design or construction work of the property development.
It is also a good idea to adjust your content a bit for every network. On Twitter, you want to engage with your audience over current events. The 140 character threshold, now 280 characters, was limiting thus making it acceptable to use informal abbreviations when necessary. It is always a good idea to see what hashtags are trending in the area of your development and join in on the conversation where you can. On Linkedin, it might be more of interest to you to show a bit of insight into how you work at your company. This can make your connection with your audience a lot more personal and trustworthy, something of importance to inexperienced homebuyers. Whereas on Instagram and Pinterest you can really showcase your developments with great visuals.
The tone of your posts should also differ a bit by platform and audience. Why? Here is an example from one of our posts.
On LinkedIn we said:
On Facebook we said:
On Twitter we said:
Can you spot the difference?
We consider both Facebook and Twitter to be a bit more of an informal setting, whilst LinkedIn is more professional and formal. Thus the difference in our tone and our more personal touch on Facebook. Also, note that you should never use emojis on LinkedIn.
Here are a few other short pointers:
Check what times are the best to post on what network, in order to get the most views and engagement for your post.
When sharing team news make sure they are appropriate and professional, this may seem obvious but is often forgotten.
"In 2016 the total budget spent on digital ads surpassed that of TV Advertisement. This is just one of the hints that there is a shift in mentality." - Quentin Delvigne, Digital Marketing Manager at Drawbotics
Growing your social media presence is important to increase your reach and gain more insight into your audience. A combination of inorganic and organic growth strategies can grow your audience much fast than a purely inorganic or organic method. Regardless though, it is important to post high quality and relevant content regularly.
Initiatives such as partnerships can boost your follower number, as well as participation in events in your industry and community. Taking part in the conversation and also encouraging your employees or colleagues to join can be very rewarding in the long run. With social media advertising, you can precisely target custom audiences relevant to your development, if not to sell to them then at least to garner more attention for your brand from the people who matter to you. Building such a social media campaign can be relatively cheap in comparison to traditional advertising, and allows an ongoing dialogue.
There are many different things to try on social media, but beyond that, you should use social media to tell your customers a continuous story about your business, your work and your ambitions.