In a sense, “reach” is the reason your company is on social media in the first place. That’s because reach is defined as the number of people who see your content on Facebook. While it’s not as strong of a sign of engagement as a “like” or “follow,” reach is the foundation of your Facebook presence: all other types of social media engagement are built on top of it. Without sufficient reach, your clever plumbing puns and cute dog photos won’t even be seen, let alone engaged with.
Reach is also somewhat controversial in the sense that we don’t know exactly how it works. Social media companies keep their algorithms locked up tighter than Fort Knox. But over the years, clever social media marketers have caught on to a few tactics that appear to work well for increasing your home service company’s reach on Facebook.
We probably don’t need to explain why videos and pictures have a tendency to grab more attention than plain text. Statistics show that Facebook updates with videos and especially pictures tend to garner more engagement than plain text posts. Not only are these multimedia elements more eye-catching to people scrolling through their timelines, they also provide you with the chance to build your visual brand. For example, many companies use tools like Adobe Express or Canva to create templates for Facebook image posts. This kind of approach helps on two fronts: it gives you all the benefits of visual status updates while helping to reinforce your brand with a signature color scheme or logo.
Thanks to the prevalence of scheduling tools, it’s now possible for your company page to publish content without someone actually being there to click that shiny blue “publish” button. But just because you have the ability to post updates at 3 AM or first thing in the morning, does it mean you should?
It depends. To increase your reach on Facebook, you should be posting new updates during the time periods when your target audience is most active. That could be during the lunch hour when people are on their break, or perhaps late at night when the house is quiet and they have some time to themselves. The only real way to know which time is best for your specific target audience is to experiment by posting at a few different times, then seeing which set of posts resonates most. You might be surprised at the results!
Companies in the same geographic region have been working together to share customers since the dawn of business. In today’s digital era, it’s even easier to collaborate on social media with other businesses that may be appealing to a similar audience. Real estate agents, mortgage brokers, insurance companies – the list of organizations it might make sense to work with is nearly endless if you think creatively. Ideally, you can find a partner organization with a similar size audience as yours but don’t shy away from working with a business that has a much larger audience (or vice versa).
How exactly should you collaborate with other local businesses on Facebook? Here’s a few ideas:
On both Facebook itself and the Meta-owned site Instagram, live video tends to perform much better than other types. By some statistics, Facebook live videos get six times the engagement as traditional videos. And since almost everyone today carries a powerful video camera around in their pocket or purse, it’s easier than ever before to stream live video directly to your page – just grab your smartphone, open up the Facebook app, and tap the right button.
What exactly should you be live streaming? You’ll see lots of business owners and operators publishing live video of themselves talking on the front-facing “selfie” cam. While this is a great place to start and can give you results, as a plumbing contractor or home services company, you can also be a bit more creative with live video. Maybe you spend a few minutes going live from the site of a particularly interesting job or do a tour of a recently completed project. For you, it’s day-to-day life, but others who don’t get to see this kind of work frequently may find it interesting.
Ryan Redding