Social media is a part of most people’s everyday lives, and with businesses using it more frequently we were interested to know how beneficial you think it is to your business. We put together a short survey to find out how people in our industry use social media, why they use it and if they find it beneficial to their business at all. The results are in and are surprisingly varied.

Twitter came out on top as the most used social media platform with 78.5% of people saying they used it, Facebook and Instagram followed closely behind at 76% and 73.3%. It was also noted that Houzz was a popular choice in the other section. The average frequency at which businesses post on social media was a few times a week at 40% with only 17.8% of people saying that they post more than once a day.

Most people said that they use social media to promote their business (83.4%), with 44.3% saying they used it for cost effective marketing and 31.6% also admitted they only use social media because its competition uses it.

When asked ‘do you think social media benefits your business?’ 78.5% of people said yes, commenting that:

• “It definitely helps with brand awareness and reinforces working relationships formed face-to-face. It also enables us to show personality in our business.”
• “Existing clients are unaware of our full range of capabilities until they see it on social media”.
• “It helps with SEO and brings in clients either directly or indirectly.”
• “Social media allows us to increase the level of engagement from new and existing customers. We have closed forum with our customers which means they can share best practice amongst their peers and also ask us instant questions about of products and installation”.

In contrast to this 24% of people said no commenting that:

• “Customers put more faith in word of mouth rather than what somebody has written online.”
• “It doesn’t seem very applicable for our business and we certainly don’t feel that we are losing work because of it. We are still very busy with repeat business but we are looking at trialling Twitter in the near future to see how it goes.”
• “The website is the key driver of new business for us. We have never got any new business through social media. I do not believe it is what customers use to find a garden designer”.
• “Very little evidence of it – time consuming for very little return.”

The survey also received other interesting comments on how social media is used for businesses such as:

• “ We use it for recognition for our own staff externally, we also have our own staff Facebook group to engage with them and communicate.”
• “We find using Houzz boards a really successful way of conveying styles in an image format at concept stage”.
• “We are lucky in our industry because we always have something interesting to photograph, imagine being an accountant!”

To see the full results of the survey, see the video below and if you have anything you want to say about how you use social media tweet us @ProLandscaperUK.