Do you know what to post on your social media page?
Most contractors don’t. And believe it or not, it’s causing them to miss out on projects.
Want to get your construction social media page out there? Look no further, here’s what we’re going to cover in this post:
1. Importance of Posting on Social Media
2. How to Free Up Your Time as a Contractor
3. What is a Content Calendar
4. 49 Day Step-by-Step Content Calendar
Let’s get into it.
Why Posting Content on Social Media Matters
We’re in the middle of a massive shift from television, radio, billboards all the way to social media, email, and websites. Whether you agree with this change or not, it’s not going to move backward, so as construction professionals we need to adapt to this shift.
Having a powerful presence online along with a strong sales process gives your company more lifetime value and ensures you’ll be in business for years to come.
But now, having great content on your social media platforms and promoting it puts you way above other contractors bidding for the same work as you, so building a social media presence can help you win more construction bids.
How to Free Up Your Time to Focus on Social Media
By now you should understand the importance of posting content on social media, but one (big) problem might still remain.
You have no time!
To combat this issue the first thing to do is confirm where your time is being spent.
Here are some things you might be struggling with and a straight-to-the-point solution on how to fix it:
1. You’re spending too much time on the job site running jobs.
This is probably the most common reason as to why a construction business is not growing, much less why they can’t post on social media. Hire a project management team that can oversee the work done on the jobsite so you can focus on sales and marketing.
If you can’t afford to hire a project manager, superintendent, or a team, then you have a couple of options:
- Hire a sharp, young worker and train them up. They’re not as expensive and they’re also more loyal than the average project manager, but it will require an investment of time and energy to train them.
- Simply cut unnecessary costs to make room for a project manager.
- Pursue big jobs to have guaranteed work for a while and include a full-time project manager in your pricing. For your convenience, here’s a post on how to get more construction jobs.
2. You have too many estimates to do.
If you’re bogged down with estimating, call an estimating company ASAP to perform takeoffs, price the project, and create a bid ready to use. Having this done-for-you service takes a huge weight off your shoulders and allows you to focus on things that really move the money needle; like selling jobs and marketing your company.
3. You’re a one-man show and you’re juggling too many things at once.
Many smaller construction companies are made up of 1 guy doing everything. The same person handling project management, estimating, sales, marketing, and finances. They’re very stressed.
The only practical solution is to hire people or services to handle some of the work. Hire a project management team, an accountant, and a marketing team (optional). Remember, the ultimate goal is to become the company’s main salesperson and focus mainly on bringing in revenue. Any business consultant will tell you that revenue is the oxygen of your business (I’m sure you’ve heard that one before).
If you can’t afford to hire people, check out #1 above.
4. You don’t know what to post.
This is also a very common reason; people just have no idea where to start.
There are 3 options you can take if you’re in this position:
- Hire a social media manager; you can find cheap options at Upwork.
- Follow a content calendar; you can hire someone to make you one or you can use the one in this article, completely free.
- Document your day; the do-it-yourself option, use inspiration from your day to think of things to post. For example, if your drywall contractor is taking too long to do their work, you can record a video about “How to Finish your Projects Faster and Better”. You can then take some of the ideas in that piece of content as inspiration for more posts. If you touch on “hanging drywall” or “relationships between GCs and subs” in your video, it’s more potential things you can post about. This way all your content branches off into more content.
What is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar is a list of posts for you to publish, and when to do it.
That’s it. Here’s a short example we made in just 10 minutes:
As you can see, there is a specific goal for every post. Putting out content on the Internet isn’t to look cool, it’s to get your name out there in a positive way that eventually leads to business. It can be easy to forget that as you get lost in the work of it, so keep that in mind.
Different posts serve different goals, some are to engage with your audience, others are to prove your authority, but ultimately they are all there to help your marketing and sales.
So now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s get into a content calendar that anyone can apply to their construction company.
The Calendar
IMPORTANT: The social media platform we’re focusing on is LinkedIn. All posts below are referring to this platform. You can follow suit and only focus on LinkedIn or you can expand to Facebook and Instagram as well. It’s entirely up to you.
Week 1
Day 1 – Introduce yourself in a video. Introduce your company, what you’re about, and what you hope to bring to everyone who follows you. It can be something you record on your phone and click post, or you can invest in camera equipment to do a professional video.
Here’s a great example of a video introduction for LinkedIn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7FsgxIK1iE
Day 2 – Post a 5-minute (or longer) video explaining something that you feel would help a lot of potential clients. For example, if you’re a drywall contractor, you can explain to GCs how to find the best drywall contractors for work.
Day 3 – Get specific idea or topic from the previous video, and make a short video going deeper into it. If you mention “change orders” in your video, you can do a quick 1-minute video explaining that specific topic. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but make sure the quality and audio of the video is presentable. Any smartphone made after 2017 should do the trick.
Day 4 – Showcase some of your work.
Day 5 – Post an image with a quote from one of your previous videos. Example from Foundr:
Day 6 – Showcase more work.
Day 7 – Post behind-the-scenes footage of your company. This allows people to get to know you on a more personal level and builds your brand. It can be something easy like taking a picture of everyone on lunch break or telling a story of something crazy that happened on the jobsite.
By now you have some content on your page and you’re getting your feet in the water.
Now that you’re a little more comfortable posting content, we’re going to turn up the notch a bit.
Week 2
Day 1 – 5-min+ video on topic of your choosing.
Day 2 – 2 images with quotes from your long video or from elsewhere.
Day 3 – 2 short videos on topics from your previous long video.
Day 4 – Showcase work. Example:
Day 5 – Behind-the-scenes content.
Day 6 – Offer a tip for anyone who is a potential client. For example, if you’re a painting contractor, you can explain what you often see on the jobsite that’s a problem and input your $0.02 on it. This can be an image or video.
Day 7 – Short status update. Let people know how you and your company are doing today. Only text, no image or video.
Now you’re 2 weeks deep into creating content for your construction company. It’s time to make your strategy a bit more sophisticated. At this point, you have 2 weeks’ worth of content on your page for anyone to see, so now we want to start getting eyeballs checking it out.
To explain how we’re going to do this, let me take you all the way back to grade school. Think back to when you were in school. If a nerdy kid wanted to get more popular, what would he do? He’d just spend time with the popular kids. This almost instantly exploded his reputation and even if he only made friends with 1 popular kid, he eventually got access to most of them. And soon enough, he was part of the group.
Apply this concept to your social media. Who are the “popular kids” in your area? In your trade? Get a hold of them to either do a recorded interview OR you can outright pay them to promote your company. Having said that, we’re starting Week 3 assuming you’ve gotten a hold of someone noteworthy in your trade or area and scheduled an interview.
Week 3
Day 1 – Do a 10-minute recorded interview with someone who has a big following in your trade or area. You will not only increase your credibility to your audience, but you’ll also learn a thing or 2 from someone deep in the game. You can take that full video and post it on LinkedIn. As for the interview itself, it can be done through Zoom, just make sure you have a camera and decent headphones.
Day 2 – Hire a video editor (or figure it out on your own) to chop up your long video into multiple pieces. This means you’ll get clips of you (or your interviewee) saying important things, and make them stand alone. These will all serve as individual pieces of content, and I’m going to assume once you do that you’ll have 3 different posts. Post one of them.
Day 3 – Post a quote of the video.
Day 4 – Behind-the-scenes post.
Day 5 – Give a “war story” from jobsite. Try to make it entertaining.
Day 6 – Post a second video from interview.
Day 7 – Post third video from interview.
At this point you should be in a good groove, so the rest of the posting will be up to your personal feel for what direction you want to go.
Week 4
Day 1 – Get another interview with the same person from last time or get a hold of another social media personality.
Day 2 – Post a quote from video. And maybe even another.
Day 3 – Say something on your mind to your audience. Can be only text or a video if you’re up for it.
Day 4 – Post a smaller clip from the second interview.
Day 5 – Showcase some sitework you recently did.
Day 6 – More behind-the-scenes content.
Day 7 – Record video on a certain topic. Can be inspired from interview (you borrowed the topic from something that came up in the video).
Week 5
Day 1 – Record another interview with different or one of previous personalities. If you can’t find anyone just post something on LinkedIn asking for people to ask you construction-related questions for you to answer in your next video.
Day 2 – Post a thought on your mind (text form).
Day 3 – Post a thought on your mind (text form). Example from Garyvee:
Day 4 – Post clip from interview. And an image with a quote of interview.
Day 5 – Show behind-the-scenes of jobsite.
Day 6 – Post a thought on your mind (text form).
Day 7 – Give advice to people through a short video. “How to Get the Most out of your Workers” is a good example of a video people might watch.
If you’ve been following this guide, you will have a solid foundation on your social media game. Your brand will be there and at the Week 6 mark, it’s all about leveraging your brand to give you more opportunities for work.
Week 6
Day 1 – Record video of yourself explaining something.
Day 2 – Text post offering a short tip.
Day 3 – Text post offering a short tip.
Day 4 – Sales pitch for services. Don’t be afraid to let your audience know what it is you offer. Don’t let yourself get friend-zoned by the people consuming your content. Example from Mr.Graziosi:
Day 5 – Interview yourself with another person in industry. Record and post entire thing.
Day 6 – Take clip from interview and post.
Day 7 – Get quote from clip and post.
Week 7
Day 1 – Show behind-the-scenes look on your construction company.
Day 2 – Showcase work on the jobsite.
Day 3 – Explain something crazy that happened to you. People love war stories; it builds a better connection as people get to know you as a person rather than just another construction company.
Day 4 – Text post promoting your company.
Day 5 – Record short video of yourself explaining a key concept most of your potential clients don’t understand.
Day 6 – Take quote from video and make it a text post.
Day 7 – Showcase some of your finest company work.
Conclusion
Feel free to bookmark this page, screenshot it, write some ideas down. Remember that this is an example content calendar for you to get inspiration from, you don’t (and shouldn’t copy it exactly). In fact, we encourage you to add your own personal touch to your social media, based on what your values and goals are.
We covered a lot of ideas and gave you all the tools you need, now it’s up to you to execute.
Social media is not complicated. The goal is to post a lot of good content that promotes your brand and let’s more people know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.
Have an interesting take on this piece? Feel free to leave your $0.02 below. And don’t forget I AM Builders is here to help you with all your estimating needs, we help contractors, developers, and architects all around America estimate jobs quickly and accurately so they can focus on what really matters for their business, sales.
Do you know what to post on your social media page?
Most contractors don’t. And believe it or not, it’s causing them to miss out on projects.
Want to get your construction social media page out there? Look no further, here’s what we’re going to cover in this post:
1. Importance of Posting on Social Media
2. How to Free Up Your Time as a Contractor
3. What is a Content Calendar
4. 49 Day Step-by-Step Content Calendar
Let’s get into it.
Why Posting Content on Social Media Matters
We’re in the middle of a massive shift from television, radio, billboards all the way to social media, email, and websites. Whether you agree with this change or not, it’s not going to move backward, so as construction professionals we need to adapt to this shift.
Having a powerful presence online along with a strong sales process gives your company more lifetime value and ensures you’ll be in business for years to come.
But now, having great content on your social media platforms and promoting it puts you way above other contractors bidding for the same work as you, so building a social media presence can help you win more construction bids.
How to Free Up Your Time to Focus on Social Media
By now you should understand the importance of posting content on social media, but one (big) problem might still remain.
You have no time!
To combat this issue the first thing to do is confirm where your time is being spent.
Here are some things you might be struggling with and a straight-to-the-point solution on how to fix it:
1. You’re spending too much time on the job site running jobs.
This is probably the most common reason as to why a construction business is not growing, much less why they can’t post on social media. Hire a project management team that can oversee the work done on the jobsite so you can focus on sales and marketing.
If you can’t afford to hire a project manager, superintendent, or a team, then you have a couple of options:
- Hire a sharp, young worker and train them up. They’re not as expensive and they’re also more loyal than the average project manager, but it will require an investment of time and energy to train them.
- Simply cut unnecessary costs to make room for a project manager.
- Pursue big jobs to have guaranteed work for a while and include a full-time project manager in your pricing. For your convenience, here’s a post on how to get more construction jobs.
2. You have too many estimates to do.
If you’re bogged down with estimating, call an estimating company ASAP to perform takeoffs, price the project, and create a bid ready to use. Having this done-for-you service takes a huge weight off your shoulders and allows you to focus on things that really move the money needle; like selling jobs and marketing your company.
3. You’re a one-man show and you’re juggling too many things at once.
Many smaller construction companies are made up of 1 guy doing everything. The same person handling project management, estimating, sales, marketing, and finances. They’re very stressed.
The only practical solution is to hire people or services to handle some of the work. Hire a project management team, an accountant, and a marketing team (optional). Remember, the ultimate goal is to become the company’s main salesperson and focus mainly on bringing in revenue. Any business consultant will tell you that revenue is the oxygen of your business (I’m sure you’ve heard that one before).
If you can’t afford to hire people, check out #1 above.
4. You don’t know what to post.
This is also a very common reason; people just have no idea where to start.
There are 3 options you can take if you’re in this position:
- Hire a social media manager; you can find cheap options at Upwork.
- Follow a content calendar; you can hire someone to make you one or you can use the one in this article, completely free.
- Document your day; the do-it-yourself option, use inspiration from your day to think of things to post. For example, if your drywall contractor is taking too long to do their work, you can record a video about “How to Finish your Projects Faster and Better”. You can then take some of the ideas in that piece of content as inspiration for more posts. If you touch on “hanging drywall” or “relationships between GCs and subs” in your video, it’s more potential things you can post about. This way all your content branches off into more content.
What is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar is a list of posts for you to publish, and when to do it.
That’s it. Here’s a short example we made in just 10 minutes:
As you can see, there is a specific goal for every post. Putting out content on the Internet isn’t to look cool, it’s to get your name out there in a positive way that eventually leads to business. It can be easy to forget that as you get lost in the work of it, so keep that in mind.
Different posts serve different goals, some are to engage with your audience, others are to prove your authority, but ultimately they are all there to help your marketing and sales.
So now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s get into a content calendar that anyone can apply to their construction company.
The Calendar
IMPORTANT: The social media platform we’re focusing on is LinkedIn. All posts below are referring to this platform. You can follow suit and only focus on LinkedIn or you can expand to Facebook and Instagram as well. It’s entirely up to you.
Week 1
Day 1 – Introduce yourself in a video. Introduce your company, what you’re about, and what you hope to bring to everyone who follows you. It can be something you record on your phone and click post, or you can invest in camera equipment to do a professional video.
Here’s a great example of a video introduction for LinkedIn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7FsgxIK1iE
Day 2 – Post a 5-minute (or longer) video explaining something that you feel would help a lot of potential clients. For example, if you’re a drywall contractor, you can explain to GCs how to find the best drywall contractors for work.
Day 3 – Get specific idea or topic from the previous video, and make a short video going deeper into it. If you mention “change orders” in your video, you can do a quick 1-minute video explaining that specific topic. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but make sure the quality and audio of the video is presentable. Any smartphone made after 2017 should do the trick.
Day 4 – Showcase some of your work.
Day 5 – Post an image with a quote from one of your previous videos. Example from Foundr:
Day 6 – Showcase more work.
Day 7 – Post behind-the-scenes footage of your company. This allows people to get to know you on a more personal level and builds your brand. It can be something easy like taking a picture of everyone on lunch break or telling a story of something crazy that happened on the jobsite.
By now you have some content on your page and you’re getting your feet in the water.
Now that you’re a little more comfortable posting content, we’re going to turn up the notch a bit.
Week 2
Day 1 – 5-min+ video on topic of your choosing.
Day 2 – 2 images with quotes from your long video or from elsewhere.
Day 3 – 2 short videos on topics from your previous long video.
Day 4 – Showcase work. Example:
Day 5 – Behind-the-scenes content.
Day 6 – Offer a tip for anyone who is a potential client. For example, if you’re a painting contractor, you can explain what you often see on the jobsite that’s a problem and input your $0.02 on it. This can be an image or video.
Day 7 – Short status update. Let people know how you and your company are doing today. Only text, no image or video.
Now you’re 2 weeks deep into creating content for your construction company. It’s time to make your strategy a bit more sophisticated. At this point, you have 2 weeks’ worth of content on your page for anyone to see, so now we want to start getting eyeballs checking it out.
To explain how we’re going to do this, let me take you all the way back to grade school. Think back to when you were in school. If a nerdy kid wanted to get more popular, what would he do? He’d just spend time with the popular kids. This almost instantly exploded his reputation and even if he only made friends with 1 popular kid, he eventually got access to most of them. And soon enough, he was part of the group.
Apply this concept to your social media. Who are the “popular kids” in your area? In your trade? Get a hold of them to either do a recorded interview OR you can outright pay them to promote your company. Having said that, we’re starting Week 3 assuming you’ve gotten a hold of someone noteworthy in your trade or area and scheduled an interview.
Week 3
Day 1 – Do a 10-minute recorded interview with someone who has a big following in your trade or area. You will not only increase your credibility to your audience, but you’ll also learn a thing or 2 from someone deep in the game. You can take that full video and post it on LinkedIn. As for the interview itself, it can be done through Zoom, just make sure you have a camera and decent headphones.
Day 2 – Hire a video editor (or figure it out on your own) to chop up your long video into multiple pieces. This means you’ll get clips of you (or your interviewee) saying important things, and make them stand alone. These will all serve as individual pieces of content, and I’m going to assume once you do that you’ll have 3 different posts. Post one of them.
Day 3 – Post a quote of the video.
Day 4 – Behind-the-scenes post.
Day 5 – Give a “war story” from jobsite. Try to make it entertaining.
Day 6 – Post a second video from interview.
Day 7 – Post third video from interview.
At this point you should be in a good groove, so the rest of the posting will be up to your personal feel for what direction you want to go.
Week 4
Day 1 – Get another interview with the same person from last time or get a hold of another social media personality.
Day 2 – Post a quote from video. And maybe even another.
Day 3 – Say something on your mind to your audience. Can be only text or a video if you’re up for it.
Day 4 – Post a smaller clip from the second interview.
Day 5 – Showcase some sitework you recently did.
Day 6 – More behind-the-scenes content.
Day 7 – Record video on a certain topic. Can be inspired from interview (you borrowed the topic from something that came up in the video).
Week 5
Day 1 – Record another interview with different or one of previous personalities. If you can’t find anyone just post something on LinkedIn asking for people to ask you construction-related questions for you to answer in your next video.
Day 2 – Post a thought on your mind (text form).
Day 3 – Post a thought on your mind (text form). Example from Garyvee:
Day 4 – Post clip from interview. And an image with a quote of interview.
Day 5 – Show behind-the-scenes of jobsite.
Day 6 – Post a thought on your mind (text form).
Day 7 – Give advice to people through a short video. “How to Get the Most out of your Workers” is a good example of a video people might watch.
If you’ve been following this guide, you will have a solid foundation on your social media game. Your brand will be there and at the Week 6 mark, it’s all about leveraging your brand to give you more opportunities for work.
Week 6
Day 1 – Record video of yourself explaining something.
Day 2 – Text post offering a short tip.
Day 3 – Text post offering a short tip.
Day 4 – Sales pitch for services. Don’t be afraid to let your audience know what it is you offer. Don’t let yourself get friend-zoned by the people consuming your content. Example from Mr.Graziosi:
Day 5 – Interview yourself with another person in industry. Record and post entire thing.
Day 6 – Take clip from interview and post.
Day 7 – Get quote from clip and post.
Week 7
Day 1 – Show behind-the-scenes look on your construction company.
Day 2 – Showcase work on the jobsite.
Day 3 – Explain something crazy that happened to you. People love war stories; it builds a better connection as people get to know you as a person rather than just another construction company.
Day 4 – Text post promoting your company.
Day 5 – Record short video of yourself explaining a key concept most of your potential clients don’t understand.
Day 6 – Take quote from video and make it a text post.
Day 7 – Showcase some of your finest company work.
Conclusion
Feel free to bookmark this page, screenshot it, write some ideas down. Remember that this is an example content calendar for you to get inspiration from, you don’t (and shouldn’t copy it exactly). In fact, we encourage you to add your own personal touch to your social media, based on what your values and goals are.
We covered a lot of ideas and gave you all the tools you need, now it’s up to you to execute.
Social media is not complicated. The goal is to post a lot of good content that promotes your brand and let’s more people know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.
Have an interesting take on this piece? Feel free to leave your $0.02 below. And don’t forget I AM Builders is here to help you with all your estimating needs, we help contractors, developers, and architects all around America estimate jobs quickly and accurately so they can focus on what really matters for their business, sales.
