If you find social media for your lawn care business overwhelming, you’re not alone. There are so many available networks to choose from. With new features popping up every day, the landscape of social media is becoming more competitive and complex than ever.
Given all of the social media tips and tools out there, it’s hard to tell which ones are the best. But what if “best” isn’t your end goal?
What worked last year might not be cutting it this year. What works well for other companies might not work for lawn care or landscaping. Your success depends on creating a targeted, industry-specific strategy that works towards your needs and goals.
With lawn care and maintenance providers in mind, this comprehensive guide will help you tackle your social media marketing plan from start to finish. Are you new to social media for lawn care? Are your current strategies just not getting you the results you’re looking for? This guide has you covered.
Why Create a Social Media Strategy?
Trends in consumer behavior show that when consumers need to solve a problem, social media is the first place they turn. Whether they’re browsing for services on Instagram or checking customer reviews on Yelp, HomeAdvisor, Google, or Facebook, consumers will turn to the online world to learn more about your brand. They seek out content that offers insight into your values, what you offer as a company, and your overall credibility.
Even if you don’t place much value on social media, millions of customers with purchasing power do. It’s become the most powerful marketing tool out there today.
However, to harness this power, you need an efficient social media strategy.
You can’t just set up an Instagram business page, for example, and start posting landscape photos. A social media strategy means planning out your content campaigns far in advance, creating a consistent schedule, and being intentional with how you use tools like hashtags, captions, and editing software.
These plans can help you set goals, track your performance, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Most importantly, creating a social media strategy can pave the way to concrete results:
- Marketers who lay out their strategies are 538% more likely to report success.
- Up to 88% of marketers who set goals for their campaigns achieve them.
- The most organized marketers are 397% more likely to report success.
- Marketers who proactively plan their campaigns are 356% more likely to report success.
What Goes Into a Social Media Strategy?
The statistics don’t lie: You need a solid strategy to establish your lawn and landscape company on social media and build an engaged customer base. But what does a social media strategy look like?
Let’s explore the five basic steps you need to take to put together a social media strategy tailored to your industry.
1. The Platform
With dozens of social media platforms constantly competing to capture the most attention, choosing the right platform can feel overwhelming. Just remember: you don’t have to be on them all — only the ones that matter.
Each social media platform delivers content with a unique format, style, and, most importantly, audience.
Before you begin selecting the right platforms, consider these factors:
- Audience: Where do your customers spend the most time? What platforms do they turn to when looking for lawn services?
- Time: How much time can you devote to social media? Some platforms, like Youtube or Instagram, might take more effort or require a higher production value to succeed.
- Resources: What skills and resources do you have to work with? Instagram and Pinterest work better with visual content, while Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube thrive on video content.
Picking the right platform comes down to the details. Here are a few of the essential social media networks for lawn care providers, as well as a few with serious potential.
Facebook
Facebook tends to appeal to an older demographic, but it still has a strong audience of users who are 25 and up. You can post text, photos, videos, and more, though visual content is especially successful on the platform.
Having a Facebook page for your business also allows you to share reviews from customers and post ads to circulate your business. Facebook is the prime platform for advertisement — it boasts the highest click-through rate (CTR) of all the social media platforms.
Instagram
With photos, 24-hour stories, short video clips (called reels), and longer videos (IGTV), Instagram hosts the widest variety of content. Content on Instagram is designed to be circulated and shared, making it a great platform to get your brand name out there.
Instagram leans toward a younger audience, yet it still has significant numbers for users between the ages of 25 and 34, as well as those between 35 and 44.
Twitter
Twitter might be known for its text content, but photos and videos still easily outperform other tweets on the platform. This makes it another great choice for visual content. Twitter users tend to be concentrated in higher-income social brackets, so the platform is ideal for seeking out a professional adult audience looking for products and services.
TikTok
TikTok caters largely to teenage, Gen Z, and younger millennial audiences, but it’s becoming one of the most popular social media networks out there. Content on TikTok has the potential to go viral — reaching hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Though TikTok may not be the traditional platform for the lawn care industry, the right kind of content could perform extremely well.
The most important factor is not to spread yourself too thin across too many networks. Instead, focus on social media that matters to your audience, as well as networks where your content will thrive.
2. The Voice
Once you’ve found the right networks for your brand, don’t be tempted to simply jump in and start sharing. It’s critical to establish the right voice and tone for your content before you start.
Ask yourself these questions:
- If your brand was a person, what would they be like? (age, gender, personality, etc.)
- What kind of tone would your brand have? (formal, professional, friendly, bold, humorous, approachable, etc.)
- What top three things would your brand value the most?
- How do you want customers to view your company?
Your content should cultivate a distinct and appealing voice that speaks to what your customers want. Keep that personality and tone consistent throughout all of your posts, captions, stories, and more.
3. The Content
When it comes to the content, your main priority should be offering value. Posting fluff or photos without context simply won’t cut it for your audience.
Think about what people might be looking for and share your company’s expertise. For instance, you might:
- Offer tips for lawn care in different seasons
- Cover the best watering practices
- Provide a tutorial on how to keep your mower blades sharp
- Compare pruning techniques for different kinds of shrubs
Focus on photo and video content to draw the eye and hold the viewer’s attention. Vivid images of your lawn care — beautifully manicured lawns, the smiling faces of your crew, or highlights of the job process — can spark interest in your potential customer.
For video content, try creating a time-lapse of a lawn makeover or a behind-the-scenes look at all the equipment it takes to accomplish the task.
4. The Posting Schedule
How many times should you be posting? When is the best time to post?
There’s a lot of conflicting information out there. The short answer is: there is no perfect posting schedule. Depending on the platform, the industry, your resources, and your audience, different schedules will work for different people.
As a general rule of thumb, your posting should be consistent across all platforms. Commit to one post per day, every other day, or twice a week — but try not to change it up.
On platforms like Twitter, you can tweet anywhere between two and ten times per day. More immediate forms of sharing, like Instagram stories or Twitter fleets, should be updated daily with anywhere from one to ten photos.
The best way to determine your ideal posting schedule is to experiment and keep an eye on your analytics.
Do your posts get more engagement in the mornings? Afternoons? Evenings? Do you notice a drop in engagement if you post more than twice per day? Get a sense of how your audience is reacting to your content and adjust your schedule accordingly.
With daily and weekly updates on different social media platforms, it isn’t always easy to keep up with demand. One way to effectively maintain your posting schedule is to create social media calendars for lawn care.
A social media content calendar can help you visualize all your planned posts in the coming weeks or even months. Following this calendar, you can create content in advance so that you’re never scrambling to put something together to share. You can use these calendars to map out special events, plan updates for your brand, and get more creative with your ideas.
5. The Community
When you post content, the goal is to cause people to react, respond, and get curious about what you can bring to the table. Social media should never be a one-way conversation — it should be a community.
Touch base with your audience through captions, comments, and DMs. Ask them questions about their lawn care preferences, respond to questions and comments on your posts, and re-share pictures posted by your clients.
You can also engage with your community in more creative ways. Try organizing a photo contest asking for your followers’ most out-of-control or unmanageable shrubs and offer to give the winner a free trim. Perhaps offer discounts for customers who share their experiences with family and friends.
The Bottom Line: Engagement Matters
To leverage success with your social media strategy, you need to tap into the values your followers care about. It takes meaningful engagement to build a relationship with your base to produce useful results. These results can take the shape of follower growth, brand awareness, lead generation, or a boost in traffic to your website.
However, the more your lawn care company grows, the more overwhelming it can be to manage your leads. If you’re ready to invest in an authoritative customer service and lead capturing solution, then Slingshot is here to help.
Slingshot takes care of customer support, leaving you with more time to focus on what you do best — providing top-quality services to your clients.
