Your community presence and regular reminders of your HVAC expertise will get people’s attention and help to build a solid reputation in your marketplace.

Company Social Media Policy

In 2020, like many other contractors, we learned the importance of having a company policy for social media. Last year saw the most divisive political climate and social media turmoil regarding both the election and the pandemic than we ever encountered before.

As a business, our page remained politically neutral. In our opinion, it’s not smart business to alienate half of your customer base.
To accomplish this, we created company policies regarding online reviews, employee personal posts, and community discussion groups. We encouraged our technicians not to tag VHP as their place of employment in their profile.

Learning from other contractors’ unfortunate experiences led us to be proactive with our staff. Why? Because addressing a problem after a post has gone viral is far more difficult.

Social Media Ad Campaigns

When it comes to ad campaigns and boosting on Facebook, we maintain a pretty conservative budget. We generally spend nothing over $200 – $500 per month. Of course, that depends on the season and promotion. In our experience, paid promotions work better on posts that have already received organic engagement.

This is akin to kindling a flame. Organic posts, once boosted, generally reach farther and don’t cost as much.

Most of our expectations and goals with our paid ad or boosted content revolve around building our page audience and followers.

When we set up paid social media announcements for equipment sales, hiring, or financing, we make sure to pair it with a landing page on our site containing a quick form to better track leads, especially if it’s a hiring post.

Remember, if you don’t measure, you’re just guessing. Measuring how your social media posts work is key to understanding how well your messaging works so you can continue to create meaningful campaigns.

Job Postings

Job posting on Facebook has come a long way. If we post a job, we often take two different approaches. The first is to create our hiring ad graphic and post it, usually to our wall. This post contains a link to a landing page on our website with a complete job description and application form.

The second approach uses that same graphic but posts it with Facebook’s specific job posting function. The Facebook ad function allows you to build a short custom application form and job description.

Facebook then shares this specifically with job boards and targeted people who are job hunting. It’s treated differently than a standard post.

We still prefer sending people to our website’s landing page as part of the process because it’s a much more thorough application.
Your Involvement

As a reminder, when hiring or creating any ad content, contractors should focus on using content and images that ‘sell the destination, not the plane.’ As the owner of a High-Performance HVAC contracting business, I have also learned that my investment in sharing our company’s content is paramount.

In our experience, if you view the goal of social media as staying connected with and relevant to your customers when they don’t need service, yours will be the name they’ll remember and call when they do.

For the team at VHP, this is one of our tools for building and maintaining solid relationships.

Daniel Squires is a licensed Michigan Master Plumber but considers himself an entrepreneur and marketer. Vincent’s Heating and Plumbing is a family-owned business that he and his brother David transformed from a mom-and-pop business to a dominant residential heating, cooling, and plumbing company in Port Huron, MI. They did this through innovative marketing and business practices. Contact him at ncilink.com/ContactMe.