For many reasons, contractors struggle to get their business on social media. If this is you, some things holding you back probably include not knowing what to post, not having time, not having content, or just having good intentions but not following through. I think most of these come down to just not having a plan. If something is important and needs to be done, you must get it on your calendar and nail down a plan. But how important is social media for your HVAC business?

Social media can do many things for your business. It's the culmination of all your other marketing efforts. It's how you set yourself apart from your competitors. It’s where you get a chance to tell your story and elevate all the other marketing initiatives you’re working on. It’s the top-of-funnel marketing and the visibility you need to help everything else you’re doing succeed.

Recently, I had a marketing expert reach out to me and ask how we could duplicate the success that another one of our clients was getting with their social media and marketing. We have been working on the organic (nonpaid) social media presence for three years. You can’t duplicate that overnight. Organic social media gets more powerful and more valuable over time. You build your audience and followers, and you can only do this when you’re actually posting.

But you’re not an art major. You don’t know what to post. And you still need a plan. I’m about to make this easy for you.

The most valuable thing on your organic social media is engagement. Engagement is a lot of things: watches, clicks, likes, comments, shares, saves. Engagement is valuable because it tells the algorithm that the content you’re putting out is interesting, so the algorithm shows it to more people. So instead of taking a ton of time, you will use your people, dates and phone to easily create your content.

Think of the 4 Cs when you start to think about your social media.

- Commitment
- Calendar
- Content
- Consistency

Commitment

What can you commit to for the long term? You can schedule most social media posts, so it's really about having things to post. Some say that more content is better, and you can make a bigger impact with more content. For our clients, we either post once a day, five days a week (three static posts and two videos) or 8x a week (Monday-Friday static posts with three videos). We also post stories on Instagram and Facebook, so you could argue that we post more than once a day, but our feed content is scheduled ahead of time, and then we repurpose EVERYTHING.

So, back to commitment, how many hours a month can you commit to social media? That's what we’re going to start with. Maybe 2 hours a week? Maybe 1 hour a week? Or maybe it’s time to figure out what your time is worth and see if you can find someone to pay less than that to help you.

Calendar

This is where you start to build out your content calendar. Your content calendar’s objective is going to be to get engagement by sharing your team, your brand, and your story. Here’s how you’re going to do that.

Step 1: What important dates are happening in your business this month? Whose birthdays and anniversaries? What specials are you running? When are you going into the community? What trainings are you doing? Start with those dates.

Step 2: What holidays or hashtag holidays are upcoming? Keep the major federal holidays in mind, and look at hashtag holidays. Days like “National Tune-Up Day, National Tradesmen Day, and AC Appreciation Day.” You can ask Google or ChatGPT to help you come up with those dates. Put those in your content calendar next.

Step 3: Next, you’re going to fill in the blanks using the 3S strategy - Show Up, Stand Out, Scale. Some of the above posts will easily fall in there. Here’s more about that:

Show Up: Show up Content is content that casts the broadest net to get in front of the most people. This is typically engaging, sharable, relatable content like memes, quotes, storytelling, newsjacking, celebrations, anniversaries and birthdays. It's anything that will help attract more people, attract more engagement and increase your visibility.

Examples:

- Photos of your team at a team outing.
- Photos of the owners with the story of how they got started.
- Photos of the homeowner that won your giveaway and a story about it.
- Photos/video talking about a relevant, upcoming weather issue that will affect the whole community and how they can avoid it.

Relatable memes.

Photos of whose birthday or anniversary it is.

Stand Out:

Stand-out content is your thought leadership content that you post to remind people what it is that you do. This is where your educational/transformational content lies, but there are other ways to position yourself as a thought leader. This type of content reminds your followers what you do, shares easy information that they can use to transform their problems and positions you as the expert in HVAC.

Examples:

- Easy DIY fix.
- Problem -> Solution videos or explanations.
- Pictures or videos of you at conferences or in meetings learning/training more.
- Pictures or videos of you on the news, on billboards, or on podcasts sharing what you do.
- Any awards you receive.

Scale: This is your promotional-type content. You only need about 20% of your content to be this type of content OR put money on it (turn it into an ad). This content is great when people are researching you. It's great for ads. It’s usually pretty hard to get a bunch of engagement on it. We like to pair it with pictures of people to try to help it get a better reach.

Examples:

- Current offers
- Specials
- Your services
- Testimonials

Content:

Now that you have your calendar to start collecting content, get all your videos for the month recorded. Get all the pictures you might need based on the content you want to schedule. Try to use pictures every day and just add a little bit of text to the picture or give more context in the caption. 

What do you normally look at on a social media feed? It’s pictures of people. They will always stand out with engagement more than anything else. Your content should always contain pictures of people when possible.

Take your content calendar, go into Canva and create however many slides you have for the days you’ll be posting. Add a note next to each slide that says what day you’re posting and what the post will be about. Then, start adding pictures to all the slides. Sometimes, you’ll need a placeholder for things happening throughout the month, but getting the bulk of this down will make your posting much easier.

Next, start working on your videos. Schedule time and record all the videos you want for the month. Maybe all of your educational content will be video this month, and you need four videos. Take an hour, record them all, and edit them simply by just adding closed captions and a title. 

Then, head to a scheduling tool and schedule all of your content. We usually manually post content on TikTok and YouTube to get the most reach, but if that’s not in your schedule, get it queued up. All of the platforms allow you to schedule directly from their desktop versions. You can also use third-party scheduling tools that make it easy to cross-schedule across platforms. I use a tool called Metricool, which I love for scheduling and analytics. The goal is to have a plan and make it easy to execute.

Consistency

The most important thing you can do with your social media is to be consistent.  A friend said something recently that speaks volumes about how organic social media works and the importance of consistent posting over time. He said, “I’d rather 100 people see 100 of my posts than one million people see 1 of my posts”- Tim Brown, Hook Agency. Think about your own content-consuming habits. What are you most likely to remember, the 1 million views video you saw or the creator you see showing up on your feed over and over again? Consistency makes an impact; consistency builds community, and consistency is what makes your social media a valuable asset for your business.

Sometimes, getting started is the hardest part. If this is you, I challenge you to start small. Maybe posting once a week, but schedule it out in advance so you get into the habit. I also encourage you to start documenting pictures and videos of everything you’re doing and drop them into a Google file. Every marketing company you work with is going to need pictures and videos, so building that asset will be beneficial for you.

Jen McKee is the founder of Kee Hart Marketing, a social media marketing agency specializing in organic and paid strategies for contractors. Contact her at jen@keehartmarketing.com or online at www.keehartmarketing.com.