Goals & Approach
When looking at an existing social media account, we first have to figure out the company’s goals. Is it exposure? More sales or clients? Higher engagement? From there, we can dive deep into what’s working and what isn’t. Built-in analytics are a great tool to utilize when it comes to looking at metrics, impressions, and overall engagement rates. We can look at metrics based on the goals moving forward and have a strong stepping off point with what the audience is already resonating with.
Something that was a consistent part of our social media strategy before I arrived at Kapur was to congratulate employees on their amazing years of service (of being #allin, we like to say). These posts were templated and didn’t have much pizazz to them. I wanted to create a few more dynamic, eye-catching designs that we could swap out to keep them from getting stale and being visually repetitive. Hashtags were also not a part of this former strategy, and with their implementation, we’ve gotten more engagement from employees themselves, colleagues, and their communities.
Choosing Your Channels
Social media often gets grouped into one thing, “social media”, when in fact, each platform has its unique algorithms, pain points, and selling points. Deciding which social media channels to utilize plays an important role in whether or not we reach our goals.
Kapur’s goals include building strong brand recognition and relationships with clients as well as the community. For these types of goals, we mainly focus on LinkedIn for building professional relationships and Facebook for reaching more of the community side of things.
Part of getting to know the communities and building business includes going to tradeshows and conferences. It’s rare that Kapur had sent anyone from the marketing team to document these events until I excitedly volunteered as tribute. Learning about the work we do from a more behind-the-scenes zone was very exciting to me, and any chance to gather high-quality content for social media and marketing materials was a huge bonus.
Challenges We Face
The civil engineering industry as a whole faces a litany of possible challenges when figuring out social media content and making successful progress towards their online goals. Many companies such as ours keep information not yet ready for public eye that could start tiffs with both local municipalities and residents. Kapur prides ourselves on building strong client relationships, but never want to come across as braggy or too promotional when it comes to mentioning these types of partnerships.
Return on Investment
We can measure our return on investment by engagement metrics across our social platforms. With an increase in comments, conversations, and follows, we know we’re engaging and connecting with our audience in a meaningful way that they want to be a part of.
The image above is the insights based on the first calendar-year period that I was working on social media with Kapur, and the Facebook page results alone rose over 100%. I’d consider that great engagement and has helped us build a better connection with our audience as well as a closer bond as a company, as an added bonus.