SMPS Boston

Favorite Five: Social Media Tips for the AEC Marketer

This article originally appeared on SMPS Boston’s website.

by Allison Flood

Social media can be a tricky landscape to navigate, especially for AEC firms. How do you know what type of content to post? What platform to post on? How do you know if your posts are successful? To simplify things, I compiled a list of my top five social media tips:

Know your audience. Think about what social networking platforms your audience uses. If you’re in the AEC industry, your audience will most likely be on LinkedIn. Regardless of what platform you use, choose one platform that you will primarily focus on to engage your audience. Think about the type of work they do and tailor your social media activity to make it relevant to them.

Social media strategy is key. What are you trying to achieve on social media? Increased sales? Increased brand awareness? Think about how this supports your organization’s overall business objectives and track your analytics to support that.

Monitor your competitors. Use their activity as a reference – see what they’re doing, how they’re doing and use this information to identify the things you’re missing in your strategy and content.

Find your voice. Carefully choose your words and punctuation. Be deliberate about your brand’s persona. For AEC marketers, that mostly means maintaining a professional tone with proper grammar and punctuation.

Optimize your content for each social networking platform. What you post on LinkedIn is not the same as what you should be posting on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. For example, you might shorten a post considerably for Twitter (due to character limits) and on LinkedIn, you might get into more detail.

Allison Flood is the assistant proposal manager at GPI in Wilmington, Mass. She also serves as the public relations liaison on the Communications Committee for the SMPS Boston chapter.