In a year’s time, we brought General Equipment Company's Facebook following from 100 to more than 5,000 – surpassing all of its key competitors. More importantly, engagement is much higher than industry averages, meaning we’re not only hitting the right people, but the content is compelling.
General Equipment Company wasn’t first to the social media table. In fact, most of its competitors were well established on Facebook, whereas General only had a handful of posts and a little more than 100 followers. General knew the potential to reach the right people (dealers and end-users) was there, it was just a matter of getting a consistent effort going and accelerating engagement to make this a viable branding and sales tool.
Though the “experts” say to rely on generating solid content and the right following will come, that is a very long-term proposition. And all the while when a company is putting together good content, but relying on Facebook to organically get this in front of the right people – especially with its ongoing efforts to monetize any success – it seems like a lot of good effort and content goes to waste.
We engaged a modified approach. Though the budget is small for this effort, we aligned General’s public relations efforts and overall branding initiatives to quickly generate compelling content. Then we always reserve a small portion of the budget (<$100/month) for ads to increase the page following and to boost key posts – all of this to carefully constructed audiences of people most likely to use, sell or rent the company’s equipment.
