Pestworld Magazine Focusing on the Business of Pest Management
Is your business active on social media? If you’re not, you and your business are most likely missing out. Every day, the conversation grows and gets louder as more people sign up and engage on various social media platforms. Social media provides a tremendous opportunity for companies to grow their business as consumers connect and engage with their favorite brands. However, this ever-increasing volume of traffic makes it that much harder for each post, message, tweet or pin you post to stand out.
But don’t give up.
Building your social media presence takes time – and making sure you do it in a way that provides value to your business is important. As a busy pest management professional, it can be difficult to find the time needed to maintain your social pages. To ensure you are spending your valuable time making a worthwhile impact on social media, there are several strategies you can implement to ensure success.
Provide Value
Successful social media pages act in an almost human-like way. They share informative, instructional and advice driven content, while also infusing personality with good humored or funny posts. They respond to questions and service issues. They have a distinct voice. Providing and showing value to a user on social media is essential to growing and engaging with fans and followers. Three quick ways to add value to your social content include:
• Provide short snippets of “how to” related content. This will show your followers and customers that you are willing to help them with any and every pest management need.
• Become an educator. Share information on seasonal pest problems and pest related news, warnings or alerts. For example, come mosquito season, offer tips on how to prevent mosquito bites and eliminate breeding grounds from the yard. This content will be especially helpful as concern grows over Zika virus.
• Share interesting pest facts. As a pest control professional, you have probably heard it all when it comes to the questions customers may have when it comes to pests in their homes. Consider sharing some of these common questions, as well as some “why” questions. Consider posting these answers in more of a “did you know” format, utilizing hashtag #didyouknow or #dyk.
The biggest disservice you can do is to treat your social media accounts as a way to push out too much irrelevant – or self-serving – information. For example, if you only post about deals and continually promote specific services to followers, they may turn off notifications or unsubscribe to your page. Adding value to your follower’s social media experience gives them a reason to stop and read the messages you post on social media, and allows for greater engagement.
Be Engaging
Social media is the perfect venue to showcase your company as an active community member, instead of a passive observer. Engaging with your fans and followers allows you to form a connection and helps to build trust. It also helps to boost your organic reach on Facebook and appear in fans’ newsfeeds.
Oftentimes, social media is used as a platform for consumers to ask questions or pose complaints. While this may seem scary, it provides you with a wonderful opportunity to showcase how invested you are in your customers. It is important to respond to questions and complaints publically and in a timely manner. If the conversation requires a more personal level of response, request they reach out to you directly, or direct message you. Direct message is best used when customer questions or complaints require you discuss details specific to their unique situation.
Not only is it important to respond to customers on social media, it is also important to start a conversation with them. Pose questions that would be compelling for customers to answer and have a conversation with them in the reply. This shows your followers that you are interested in their thoughts and hearing what they have to say. It also makes you more relatable as a company.
Tell Your Story with Visuals
Images catch our attention, keep our attention and are understood faster than text. Because of this, it is important to have a strong digital or visual identity on social media. Take photos that apply to pest management and share them with your followers in an interesting way. Avoid graphic images, and instead focus on images that can educate followers. Teach them about pests and how to get rid of them. Tell them about bugs that are beneficial to our environment and talk about seasonal or regional pests.
Be Patient
Your social media platforms won’t grow overnight. It takes time, energy and patience to grow them into thoughtful, engaging sites. Your time is valuable, and oftentimes, social media can fall to the backburner in terms of importance. If you can reserve some time each day to engage with followers and showcase your personality, you will have a more interactive following and thoughtful site.
Spend a Little Money
While you’re spending all this time and energy posting great content, you want to be sure people are seeing it. Facebook makes this more challenging by the day with various updates to its News Feed algorithm, EdgeRank. In order to grow and engage with your fans, you must put some money behind your efforts. Facebook and Twitter allow for you to boost or promote your posts to ensure your content appears in the feed of more of your fans and followers. As more users can see and thereby engage with your content, the more interaction you’ll see. You may also consider checking out the Mainframe digital marketing agency powered by PPMA. It’s a subscription service that provides you with timely content as well as other digital assets.
The Bottom Line
Standing out on social media and finally reaping the fruits of your efforts may seem daunting, but given time, these channels prove to be a valuable and integral part of your customer relations and marketing strategies. You don’t need a large budget to build an engaging and valuable social media presence – just remember to provide value, engage with your followers, show your personality, think visually and most importantly – be patient. What’s that famous saying? “If you build it, they will come.” Build out your social media pages and establish a brand presence. Customers and potential customers will come.
