4 Top Tips for Architects Using Social Media for Business

Like it or not, social media marketing is crucial to getting your brand, work, and efforts thoroughly noticed. While portfolio websites such as Dexinger and World Architects are great for anyone in the field of architecture and design, we can’t be sure that this sort of visibility guarantees an all-embracing reach. In the past, architectural firms relied on PR strategies with the help of industry publications and events. This may work even today, however, much like the portfolio platforms it doesn’t open up possibilities the way social media does.

Social media allows you to reach millions of people at just the click of a button. Not only does it allow you to increase brand awareness among millions of end users and showcase your portfolio, but it also enables you to gather data and insights, generate new leads, and drive traffic to your website.

Since monitoring and maintain your social media accounts can easily become a tedious task, it’s important to know exactly how to utilize this medium if you want to fully reap the benefits. Here are a few tips on how architectural firms can utilize social media to build fresh connections and optimize social media efforts.

Choose Wisely

Wading through the waters of social media is not as simple as it may seem. With a plethora of options available to businesses, it’s easy to get lost in the possibilities and even make the wrong choices. Selecting just the right channel for your type of work and brand will take a little time and thought.

While you are contemplating your options, it may help to think over company objectives as well as your “marketing strategy”. Typically the best type of social media platforms are the ones that rank high in terms of users, shares, and check ins—or in other words –the most popular ones.

Next, you need to determine what type of audience you are targeting. What are the needs, interests, demographics, and online patterns of this particular audience? Each social media platform is somehow catering to specific needs which automatically cater to a specific audience.

For instance, LinkedIn is a great option if you want to create a professional image and perhaps find other business or people who you can partner with or gather insights from. If you prefer image-based communication, opt for platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook. One-liner content with respect to press releases, industrial news, and updates is best served by Twitter. Remember, each platform has specific userships and it’s important to know these before you reach a decision.

Generate Unique Content

When it comes to generating worthwhile content, it is important to first establish a strategy. Posting without a clear aim or direction will confuse your audience and leave you baffled every time you think over what to try next. For example, how often should you update your posts? What tools can you use to automate the process (when and where necessary)? How frequent should image-sharing be? How frequent should one-to-one interaction be with potential leads?

It is also helpful to decide on “topics to be shared” in advance such as news about an ongoing event or images of an on-going project and so on. Make sure you keep your content simple, short and relevant. Experts recommend posting updates with 80 characters or less since typical social media audiences tend to skip through lengthy posts. This is ideal for an architectural firm that should naturally focus more on showing (images) rather than telling (words).

Invest and Promote

While generating unique content is extremely important, the worth of that content can easily lose its validity if it lacks a large number of viewers. This is why companies must invest in paid media to increase reach. Content without a sound audience is like running a business without any customers. Hence, growing your community and paying for reach shouldn’t seem like a worthless investment.

If paid publicity is just not your style, aim for paid advertising options. For more traffic, awareness and conversions, explore Facebook’s easy-to-use advertising tools. If you are looking to find specific clients based on job title/function, age, industry, company size, and LinkedIn Groups you can opt for LinkedIn Ads and Sponsored Updates.

Analyze the Insight

Apart from building your brand image, increasing awareness, and improving company-to-client engagement, it is essential to extract data from your social media accounts. Social media pages offer valuable insights that are necessary to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Without these insights or analytics, our social media efforts could be a complete waste of time. Depending on what your marketing objectives were to begin with, social media analytics should tell you how far you are getting in terms of “results”. Also, knowing your most popular content, common search terms, and traffic sources will aid you in adjusting your future content plans and ensuring relevancy.

Question: What are your best tips for succeeding with social media?

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This is a guest post by Alison Stone. 

Alison provides dissertation help at Dissertation Cube where students come with their dissertations. In her spare time she writes blogs for students just starting their career and for those who are fresh in jobs. Learn more about Alison on Google+.