The importance of social media is indisputable. A good social media strategy can play a huge role in your success as a builder. But where should you begin, and where are you going to see a return on your efforts? First off, here are 7 things to think about and include into your social media strategy.

What are your goals?

It’s straight forward enough to begin posting things to various social platforms. What’s harder is coming up with a coherent strategy of what and why you are posting.

What are the main goals you want to accomplish using social media? Are you trying to grow your overall following? Is finding new projects and building connections with them the objective? Or is social media a place for you to provide service and communicate with existing homeowners? Settling on real goals and objectives will get you off to a great start with social media. It’s also one that many people tend to skip.

Content is King

Experts and novices alike all love to extol the value of creating ‘great content'. But what are they talking about, what is great content, and how are you supposed to be creating so much of it?

Unfortunately, there's no single correct answer. But this general litmus test should give a decent idea of whether or not something qualifies as ‘great content’.


Choose three customers you want to know about your construction services. Put yourself in each of their heads, and read the post you’ve just written. Are you happy you found that post? If yes, post it! If not, ask yourself why and rethink.

Design Your Posts for Sharing

The most shared and reposted content will be that which is genuine, valuable, and helpful to its readers. So plan your content with share-ability in mind, and look for content posted by others that you can share and comment on yourself.

Conversations Not Billboards

When it works, social media has a community feel to it, with consumers and producers posting back and forth in equal parts. The famous 80/20 rule says you should devote 80% of your posts to sharing content from relevant sources and influencers, and reserving just 20% for posting about your construction company. Don’t treat social media like a billboard to post updates only about yourself. Survey your followers. Collect feedback. Post valuable things from elsewhere. And be willing to let your own voice speak through your social. After all, it's yours!

Video is Here

On a more focused note, how does video play into all of this? The majority of brands and companies, especially smaller ones, will admit that they wish they were doing more with video. But the time, resources, and effort needed to produce quality video can be a serious blocker. Well here’s a statistic to motivate you.

Social posts containing video receive almost 50% more views than their non-video peers, according to a recent HubSpot article. And as new platforms like Vine and Vimeo continue to gain traction, video will play an ever larger role on social media.

Stop Dividing Social from Your Website

In the early days of social, social media and home websites tended to remain in separate silos. Obviously, this makes very little sense. Forbes recommends adding a prominent set of social media icons to your website’s homepage, to make sure homeowners and visitors are being piped into your social channels as well. And this straight forward update takes only about two minutes with a free social icons plugin like this.

Linking Back to Your Website

Now that you're linking from your website to your social media accounts, it probably makes sense to do the same thing in reverse. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and most other social platforms have space in your profile to link to your website.

But, if you're feeling ambitious, you can take it up a notch and try automatically syncing your social media content straight to your site. All of the major social platforms have methods to embed a stream on a site. Some even let you combine posts from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms into a single feed, like this!

What role does social media fill in your contractor company? We're excited to know what lessons you've learned from social media marketing. Tell us in the comments section, and maybe we'll share your content on our own social channels!