Brand awareness is the main benefit of Twitter, but it’s only helpful if you’re connecting with local people and businesses. Try to follow intelligently by looking at locations in people’s bios and check their activity to increase the likelihood that they will follow you back.

Once you’ve followed a few local businesses, you should start to see similar suggestions in your sidebar. By liking, retweeting and engaging in other people’s discussions - and starting your own conversations around trending topics - you can drive engagement with your profile, and hopefully push people back towards your website.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn aren’t the end of the social media discussion, of course. Even if you don’t use them yourself, you’re probably aware of the influence of Instagram and YouTube.

Instagram is a platform built around sharing attractive photos, and a favourite haunt of celebrities. YouTube is the world’s premier platform for video content and is more popular than TV among young people (and by quite a wide margin). These platforms can be valuable for certain businesses.

Instagram is particularly suited to things that are visually impressive, or lifestyle related. This could potentially include impressive builds and prestige projects. However, its audience skews young, and it should only be used as a tool to promote your brand, rather than a way to increase reach.

YouTube is a slightly different story. While it isn’t a place to find valuable leads, it can be a worthwhile resource to support your website. Embedding videos on your website keeps people glued to the page - and the longer people spend on a page, the more Google tends to like it.

Slick video content can be highly informative and appealing, providing a useful tool in your customer’s decision-making process. Videos also perform well when they’re uploaded straight to Facebook or Twitter, however, so a YouTube account isn’t always necessary.

Focus your efforts where it matters

While this can feel like a lot to deal with, it isn’t necessary to appear everywhere. It wouldn’t make much sense for your construction company to appear on Snapchat, for example, or host its own Pinterest page if your target audience doesn’t use these platforms.

Try to use your resources effectively to establish a presence on every platform that seems worthwhile, based on where your audience is and the value to your brand. The more places you appear, the bigger your reach will seem, and the more impressed potential clients will be.

The experts at Euro Start Entreprises

We’ve teamed up with business experts Euro Start Entreprises to help small construction and landscape businesses grow. Euro Start Entreprises have been helping entrepreneurs open and expand their businesses all over the globe since 2007. With offices and agents in over 30 countries, they provide not only company formation services but accountants, serviced offices, foreign exchange services, company checks, business insurance and telecommunications services. Read more of their advice and tips for small businesses.

Caterpillar provides links to blogs or websites which include content which Caterpillar believes could be helpful for small construction and landscaping businesses. Caterpillar and its independent dealers appreciate this business and Caterpillar intends to provide some support to the customers by such links. Please note, however, that Caterpillar assumes no legal responsibility for the content of the blogs or websites. The content has been created by third parties who are responsible for its accuracy.