10 Reasons Why Home Performance Professionals Should Embrace Social Media.

First off, know this: Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter aren't just for high school kids broadcasting breakfast orders anymore. Small business owners and Fortune 500 executives alike are using social media to build reputation and trust while networking with other leaders in their fields.

Sure, you'll find a little bit of play and a little bit of chit-chat in the social mediasphere. But it's also serious business. According to Quantcast, users of Twitter skew to the home performance target demographic: homeowners, with kids, women oriented, higher income. Not exactly the high school set.

For my Productive Uses of Social Media talk at the ACI Affordable Comfort Conference, I surveyed home energy efficiency professionals across the country, and the early adopters in our industry are unified in the strong support for using social media to promote their energy efficiency contracting businesses and build their personal reputations. Summarizing what I heard from pro's ranging from home performance contractors to manufacturers to design/build firms to green building consultants, here are the top ten reasons why social media participation makes good business sense:

1. Go Local. Social media communities around specific localities are loyal and powerful.

The home performance business is fundamentally local, and social media enables you to build your awareness and reputation amongst influential people in your community. The people who participate in social media are spreaders. Good people to know. Use any one of the handful of local search tools to identify people in your local community, follow them, and they'll likely follow you back. Be the thought leader on energy efficiency in your community. Check out our Guide to Local Twitter Search Tools for Home Performance PRO's that allow you to search by city, or even neighborhood. For a great example, check out Amanda Evans of Advanced Home Analysts in Santa Fe, NM. Through her twitter account, @AHAenergyaudits and her blog, she's established herself as the leader in her community.

2. Social media users are the target audience you want to reach.

Stats show that folks on Twitter and Facebook look a lot like potential customers for home performance and remodeling contractors. On Twitter, 55 percent of users are women, 47 percent have kids, and 30 percent make more than $100K. With 106 million total Twitter users, that's a big market of (potential) homeowners that are in or entering the prime remodeling years of their lives.

3. It's an effective way to listen and learn about national trends.

Twitter is an amazing listening tool. Create a search for "energy audit," for example, and you'll experience why consumers are so confused about them. This search, which I leave running at all times, shows the barrage of what consumers are facing--free, cheap, self, etc. It is no wonder we're all having a hard time explaining the difference between a full, BPI-style whole house energy audit. Monitoring a stream of tweets like this also puts you in a position to answer questions, dispel misinformation, appease bad experiences people may have had—among consumers.

4. It's an efficient way to create content.

"Writing the text book" on any topic will, of course, establish you as an expert in your field. With social media, you don't have to. Short, topical messages for both consumers and fellow professionals will build your reputation in your field without much effort. Horizon Residential Energy Services in South Portland, ME does a great job of this on their Facebook page.

5. It's big, it's growing, and it's here to stay.

Twitter has some 106 million users, with about 300,000 new people signing up every day. Facebook has over 410 million users—which means that if it were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. (See the video below.) The fact is, it's easy to pass social media off as a fad, but the numbers say otherwise. Without a doubt, the social media landscape as we see it today will change. It is remarkably fluid and ever evolving. In my mind, though, that is a reason to engage now. As the sites, places and ecosystem of social media morph, you need to be involved to be able to take advantage of those changes as they happen.

6. It's not hard.

One of the key findings of they survey I did of Home Performance PRO's using Twitter is that everyone who has been doing it for a while says it is "easy." It will take some time to get up to speed, but once you're in the groove, a couple minutes here and there is all it takes to maintain an active presence. Green building consultant Carl Seville (@GreenCurmudgeon on Twitter) says it well: "The few minutes it takes to generate a tweet is a good investment."

7. It creates national community within our profession.

Our community comes together periodically at conferences like ACI, RESNET, GreenBuild and NESEA. In the past year, given the attention being focused on the residential energy efficiency opportunity, these have been extraordinary community building, networking and learning events. But few of us have the time or budgets to be conference hoppers, and social media offers the opportunity for us to remain connected in between. The Home Energy Efficiency PRO's list on Twitter is one good place to start, and is growing daily. 

8. It's the best way to connect with the media.

Most marketing seminars will counsel you to send out press releases. But this "push" style of PR is increasingly ineffective. In modern journalism, most writers have a Twitter account they use for research, to source ideas, and to promote their own stories. Journalists on Twitter are remarkably accessible. Find them, follow them, and build relationships with them before you push your latest press release in their face. The chances of a response will be improved dramatically.

9. We have a massive educational challenge in front of us all.

Social media is a great way to educate a broad audience. Collectively, we have 138 million US/Canada residential units to fix and, for the most part, the vast majority don't understand what we do. Social media is one more channel that can help our education challenge.

10. Protect your own brand search.

Local businesses face the challenge of competing for their own brand search with a growing number of aggregators like Service Magic, Yelp, the Yellow Pages and others. A solid presence for your company on Twitter and Facebook will typically show up as separate listings from your primary website in a search result. We call it "swarming your SERP" (search engine result page). Additional listings will increase the chances of you winning your own search, and not letting larger, more powerful websites siphon off traffic that should come directly to you.

If you're interested in learning more, check out the presentation I gave at the 2010 Affordable Comfort Conference in Austin, Texas, on productive uses of social media for energy efficiency pros. And watch this fascinating video: