According to a survey by Harvard Business Review magazine, 2011, around 58 percent of companies revealed that they are using social media to promote their business. The report, Social Media: What Most Companies Don’t Know, also revealed that another 21 percent of companies are planning to use social media in the near future. A lot of engineering, architectural, and construction (AEC) companies are gradually recognizing the importance of social media in business.
With Building Information Modeling (BIM) emerging as a new trend in the construction industry, the role of social media is growing in importance. Successful execution of BIM depends a lot on how a business can create a collaborative working environment in the organization. Effective use of social media can play a major role to this end. Read on to know how construction companies can leverage social media.
Top Three Tips for Construction Companies on Using Social Media
The first thing to do is to choose social media sites where you should join. Once you know where your potential customers and industry leaders gather on the internet, you can easily connect with them by joining those social media sites. Following are the top three useful tips on how companies in the AEC industry can leverage social media.
- Ask for suggestions – You can use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to seek suggestions from customers and industry experts. While experts can inform you about industry trends, customers can share their thoughts about your product or service. All these eventually help you upgrade your service, keeping in mind the demand and expectation of end users.
- Create a buzz – Construction companies can also use social media to announce upcoming events or launch of new products. There are many ways your company can make an announcement over social media sites. For example, you can publish a blog, post a tweet, and/or write a note on Facebook. One good idea is to invite other users to comment on your post. This helps to create a buzz before or after the launch of a new project.
- Communicate proactively – Getting positive feedback on social media is a good achievement. But it takes you nowhere, unless you capitalize on those. Simply put, you should respond to comments from your audience proactively. This improves audience engagement, which eventually contributes to increased brand reliability and brand identity.
Most construction companies have a separate department for managing social media. While this is a good idea, you should also motivate your existing employees to take part in social media activities. Imagine your plumbing contractor writing a post about how he designed a great plumbing plan recently. Direct participation of your employees can take your social media venture to the next level.
Looking to learn more about social media and how can be effective for the construction industry? Be sure to join our Social Media Summit for Construction Brands on Tuesday September 18 at 1PM CDT. You can read about and register for the Social Media Summit Here.
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About the Author: Hi, I’m Aliya Jennifer from BIMhub, a platform that encourages all players of the AEC industry to collaborate throughout the building life cycle from creation, maintenance, amortization and depreciation. To know more about our BIM services, please visit our site.
We have been implementing this over the past few months. I tell you that for the beginner in the social media market it is a challenge learning how to put all this into place, but seems to be slowly working. I find it to be a trial and error process. But we do believe that it is what needs to be done to stay in touch with our customers and to give them the service that they deserve.
Great feedback Robert – it is good to be available via all channels for your customers since some may prefer one social media format to another.
Thanks for sharing this article. Really informative. Social media plays a key role in company’s success. Using social media, we got lot of options for advertising and getting direct feedback. For a starter, it might be a difficult task to gain more traffic but through proper planning we can attract more customers and gain more traffic.
Social Media is an important tool for any business. It is good to see that the construction is starting to see the potential of it. Hopefully this should increase the construction industry’s exposure.