Time to get social.
Time to engage with your audience.
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Duayne
I believe the most important thing in social media is running your own race and connecting with the people that you want to connect with.
Get Social
Amelia
Duayne, at Live Life Build, we love social media as a platform for helping builders build presence for their business, be able to show clients how they work, how they operate, what they’re like as people and as professionals.
We think it’s a really great vehicle for creating connections with potential clients and being able to get projects with people that are like minded and that are actually a good fit for you, in terms of your type of business that you run.
However, the world of social media can be a pretty deep and dirty pond, when you start digging into it.
Particularly when it comes to the building industry. There are lots of builders out there who on the surface look like, it’s all bells and whistles, they have huge followings. And you can really see how seductive it is for builders to think, “I’ve got to get my business to that before this is going to be at all useful for me. It’s all just too hard. There’s no way in the world I can do that, I can’t afford the video production, I can’t afford the photography, this is just pointless.”
How do you suggest builders think about social media for their business and not get overwhelmed by all the numbers and all of those flashy builders that we see out there?
Duayne
It can be really difficult and sometimes I still get sucked into it as well.
But you’ve really got to ignore the numbers. And, again, it’s just one of those things. For me, I’m in a place now where I’m just really comfortable with what we do in all my businesses. We’re very open and we’re very honest, and we show the real deal.
So we attract like minded people. And for me, no different to the numbers in my building business. The numbers are the numbers. We’ve never bought a follower, we’ve never engaged in any of that sort of backdoor stuff. And everything has grown very organically.
And for me, that is the success of our businesses, including Live Life Build, because we’re attracting people that are on the same page as us. Attracting people who want to work with us.
Audience Engagement
It’s the same way my building business and for me, there’s a few things to look at now. With my building business, we only do a certain amount of jobs a year. So, what is the point of me having ten, twenty, a hundred thousand followers. If I’m going to have followers, I want followers that are genuinely interested in what I’m doing, who I am, and what I’m trying to achieve.
And ultimately, I want those followers to flow through into clients. And so in the area that we work in South East Queensland, but depending on the size of job, we do somewhere between six and maybe twelve jobs a year. So ten thousand followers is useless to me.
And the other thing that is really important to me is engagement. I don’t want to have tens of thousands of followers that aren’t engaged in what I’m doing. And for me to have the amount of followers I have across multiple businesses, and personally, I know those followers. They are interested in me. They are interested in Live Life Build. They are interested in what we’re putting out there. I can communicate with them, they ask questions, and we get involved. And for me, that’s the important part.
I don’t like the fake!
And to me social media has a lot of fake!
Amelia
We hear a lot about builders in the industry, know a lot about behind the scenes and a lot of building businesses in the industry. And there’s a lot of builders out there with really big following numbers and big social media metrics in their businesses that are not doing well financially. And yet, they’ve got all of the front facing high glossy, really good looking stuff happening.
And behind the scenes, things are not great, and they’re not running sustainable businesses and things are actually really problematic for them. So, it’s hard because it can be natural to compare yourself to that and think you’ll never measure up and what’s the point? But, it’s so important to run your own race, isn’t it?
Duayne
And that’s exactly what we do. We do it with Live Life Build, and I do it in my building business. For me, it’s about what I’m trying to achieve.
With Live Life Build we’re changing the industry. We are making a difference. We’re saving people’s lives. We’re saving people’s marriages, relationships, businesses, and that’s a passion. And so, I want to connect with those types of people. So for me it’s really important to run your own race. Ignore what’s going on around you, because so much of it is just fake news. And believe in yourself. I think that’s probably the biggest thing. Have confidence, believe in yourself.
And whether you’ve got a hundred followers or a couple of thousand, whatever it may be, connect with them. One of the most important things I believe, in social media, is running your own race and connecting with the people that you want to connect with.
Amelia
You can get really caught up in worrying about what others think of you. Being judged by others, that can then just mean that you put a bunch of hurdles in front of yourself. And at the end of the day, what those hurdles mean is you’re not getting to put yourself out there and show yourself to the people who are desperately trying to find a builder to work with, who has your ‘special sauce’, your special way of doing things.
And you’re really limiting the ability for people to find you by getting caught up in what other people might think of what you’re doing.
Duayne
With the way social media works, what’s the point of having 10,000 followers that are spread across the State or Australia, because they’re never going to build with you. So for me, it’s really important to find clients or find followers that are in your area that are interested in what you do. Ignore what I call ‘rubbish’, turn all the rubbish off.
And I think probably for me one way that I really stay sane with it and run my own race is, I don’t get caught up in the scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. We all know it’s all set up just to keep us looking, and we all know that you’ll lose an hour scrolling to find something that you’re interested in.
You want your clients to get on there, see what you’re doing, have an interest in you, follow you for a couple of months, a couple of years, and eventually come and build with you. So, ignore the numbers and run your own race.
Amelia
And stop comparing yourself to others.
You may also like to watch our previous discussion on How to Build and Maintain Client Trust.
Marketing is one of the content themes that we discuss in depth with our residential builders inside Live Life Build. Marketing can often be overlooked when planning your time and your projects, but plays such an important role in who you end up working with, as well as having a consistent pipeline of projects to work on.