The Power of Pictures and Facebook
The old saying goes: “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This is especially true with Facebook. With its over 500 million users, over 30 billion (with a B) pieces of content are shared every month (source ). The most engaging pieces are photos and videos. Your customers love to talk about and share photos with their friends.
Similar Situation Stories
My friend Chris Baggott from Compendium regularly discusses the power of similar situation stories. According to Chris, “Similar Situation Content is where you get others to talk about themselves or you talk about how you have helped others. What you are trying to provide is the kind of content that creates a vision where others can see themselves.”
Most of the pieces of content we create for marketing are based on similar situation stories. With radio spots, you might have a customer talk about how you helped them with their air conditioning problem. With your direct mail, you might show pictures of people that look similar to the recipient. With blog posts, you might discuss five problems that customers consistently have with their thermostats that relate very closely to your prospects.
Now for Facebook, we know two things. 1. People love sharing photos on Facebook and 2. People relate to similar situation stories. You, on the other hand, want your customers to share your posts on Facebook because, most likely, their friends are prospects of yours (think about that for a while).
Making Pictures Work on Facebook
Many of our customers arm their technicians with cameras to get the best similar situation stories to share on Facebook.
In this example, Ocean Air from Mesa, AZ, shares these filter images from a recent cleaning. “Not changing your filter = Bad for you, good for me!”
Simpson Air from Florida added a similar post, stating “And she wondered why her system was not cooling.... Change your filters! Yuck!”
Multiple customers shared this image from Simpson where the technician was almost entirely inside the AC unit. “At Simpson Air - we really "get into" what we do!”
Making It Work
We are in the process of having our kitchen redone, and our contractor asked how he could use Facebook more efficiently. My wife stated quickly and simply – share your work on your Facebook page…a picture is worth a thousand words.
For you to make this happen, just follow a couple simple steps:
1. Arm technicians with a high-quality digital camera.
2. Consistently think about opportunities where a photo can be taken. Get a “nose” for the story.
3. Ask for permission when needed.
Joe Pulizzi is CEO of SocialTract , the leading blogging and content service designed for service companies. SocialTract is part of the Content Marketing Institute , which runs the largest international content marketing event, Content Marketing World (Sept 6-8, 2011). Joe is also co-author of Get Content Get Customers, which details how companies can publish content to drive revenues. Joe can be reached at [email protected].