Is Twitter Good for Contractors? – Only if You’re up to the Challenge

It seems that this question was just being asked about Facebook the other day. So what is the deal with Twitter, and should you use it as a contractor? Well, we do. We realize that Twitter can seem daunting at first. Here are some tips on good ways to use Twitter that benefit you, your potential customers, and the contracting community: Twitter can make your business look pretty cool – We sometimes have trouble getting the image of A&A Services out, and we want to make sure people see us as someone who does the job right the first time, every time. This background can be viewed by everyone that comes on the page, and has a much bigger WOW factor than Facebook. Look at how clean our truck and storefront looks. Twitter followers might actually better represent your customer base than Facebook – Many of the people that use Twitter are either young or in prominent positions in their respective companies (or both). At A&A we get followed by people like Corey Eridon (@Corey_bos; over 1,300 followers) who not only represents a potential customer (she lives somewhere around Boston) but when she mentions us, our name goes out to over 1,300 people! People who are 25-55 make up more than half of Twitter’s demographic, it’s not just for young people. Below is an example of Corey’s mention of us:

Twitter lets you keep in touch with other contractors, and see what’s current in the industry – Writing about relevant content is one of the best ways to get found online. If you want to know what other successful contractors are doing, the nice thing about Twitter is, you can just ask! Just type the “@” (at) symbol and then find the handle (user name) of the person you are trying to reach out to. In the conversation below you can see us asking one of the top 15 window manufacturers in the United States (@ThompsonCreek) for a link to one of their new commercials we heard about through the Washington Post. Just having this online conversation puts our name out in front of all of Thompson Creek followers (over 660 people!): 

 Advertising on Twitter is dirt cheap compared to facebook – Twitter’s ad space is a burgeoning market. If you get in on the action before too long, you can target your audience you want to advertise to, and do it for often less than $10 a day. Twitter is growing and growing every day, and before long your potential customers will be on Twitter, we promise. If you look at our Twitter account (ours is @AAServicesHome) we are on it almost every day, eager and willing to talk to the online community. Although measuring ROI from Twitter is not an exact science (sorry to you lead source freaks out there) we can tell you for sure that the emphasis that our customers feel from social media is real, and that we want to make sure we deliver the most relevant content out there. Twitter jump-starts your blog articles – Just like this blog article, we post every blog we make onto Twitter after we make it. We do not only post right after the article is done however, we actually have a neat little tool from a company called Hubspot (@Hubspot) to schedule our tweets at the perfect time of day.

Making sure to segment your Tweets and not bombard your Tweets with 10 posts at one time is key to maintaining an attractive Twitter account. Blog articles are sort of like snowballs rolling down a hill, it is important to get a good start to build your snowball. Above is an example of an attractive tweet we used to promote our blog. This blog was Retweeted by @HappyAttics, who has over 15,000 followers. That means we got our name out to 15,000 people relevant to the contracting industry for free just by Tweeting the message above.