Let’s face it: when you sell a fun product, like cars or pizza or clothing, it’s not too hard to have fun social media accounts. You can talk about the latest apps that can be integrated with your car’s stereo system, or send out a coupon for a two-for-Tuesday deal on pies, or tweet a picture of one of the actors from “Pretty Little Liars” wearing one of your shirts to a party.
But when you sell a decidedly less-sexy product, such as plumbing or construction vehicles, it’s a lot harder to draw people in on social media. Or is it? Actually, with a little creativity, your social media accounts can be pretty spectacular, even if you’re marketing an un-flashy service.
Here are tips on how to spice up your feeds.
Jump on a Holiday
Everyone loves the holidays, and you can engage people on social media simply by thinking creatively about the calendar. H&R Block, the tax prep service, capitalized on the hype over Valentine’s Day to come up with a clever campaign. It set up an IRS (Internal Romance Service) form designed to suggest the best V-Day gifts and promoted the funny form on its social media accounts.
Make a Pop Culture Reference
Pop culture is the bread and butter of social media, and if you can incorporate your product or services into it, you’ll do well. For example, in a video posted on YouTube by Mississippi CAT rental store Puckett Rents, CAT excavators are shown playing the world’s biggest game of Jenga, using the machines to move around the life-sized pieces. Puckett cross-promoted the video on its Facebook and Twitter accounts to give it more exposure.
Employ Awesome Pictures
Social networks are a visually based medium, and you can capture someone’s attention by posting different, intriguing photos that are available no matter what your niche. The Facebook page for Agilent Technology, a lab, uses eye-catching photos of things as commonplace as a coffee cup to tell a story. One recent post noted that in that coffee cup, additives could include everything from soybeans to dirt (eww).
Have Some Fun
Social media accounts should never be dry or dull, no matter how straightforward your industry. Take a hint from the Pinterest pages of Apfelbaum Inc., a company that caters to stamp collectors. In addition to informative boards about stamps from all over the world, it also has a “fun” page showcasing incredibly creative uses for stamps, from covering an old guitar to serving as the numbers on a clock.
Dare to Be Different
The worst thing you can do on social media is look like everyone else, especially if what you sell is not quite as interesting as products from those other companies. Cvent, a cloud-based event management platform, creates very unique headers for its Facebook page that incorporate a lot more text than most businesses. It updates the photo according to what it’s trying to promote. Recently, the cover had a small picture of its workforce along with a message saying the company is hiring and touting its many “best places to work” awards.
