Patience Jones: Hello, and welcome to As Built, the podcast from Graphicmachine about architecture firms and buildings, and how both get built. I'm your co-host, Patience Jones. With me is Brian Jones, your other co-host. Thank you for joining us. Today, we are talking about social media for architects. "Boo," say all the architects.
Brian Jones: [laughs]
Patience Jones: "No social media, it's terrible." And we're not here to discourage you from that. You can hold that belief, for sure. But like a lot of things: chewable vitamins, working out, et cetera, it's still good for your firm.
Brian Jones: Yes. And for you, potentially. [laughs]
Patience Jones: Yes. Even more important, I suppose.
Brian Jones: So, why do you need to be on social media?
Patience Jones: I can hear now everyone going, "I don't." You need to be on social media for a couple of really important reasons. One, that's where the people are that you want to reach. That's where your current clients are, it's where your future clients are, it's where the media is, and it's where your competitors are. It also helps you control the narrative. So, talking about changes in your firm, talking about projects that you're working on helps you be the voice of that instead of inadvertently delegating that to somebody else. Social media allows you to show your firm's culture and personality. That helps with recruitment, and it also helps with retention of people.
Brian Jones: The unsung reason why this is so important is that being at the top of a person's mind is pretty important when they come to a point where they need to engage with your firm, when they need to find an expert for a panel, any number of reasons they might want to contact you. If you are not present, they won't know that you are there. And so, you are ceding that opportunity.
Patience Jones: Nature abhors a vacuum, and somebody is going to find an architect for their project. They're not going to not do the project because they didn't know that you existed, no matter how much we would like to believe that. So, there are 40 gazillion social media channels.
Brian Jones: Yes.
Patience Jones: Where do architects need to be?
Brian Jones: First of all, I recognize that there's a finite amount of time in a person's day.
Patience Jones: Yes.
Brian Jones: When we talk about these channels, think about, where can you be effectively? If you can't be on all of these, that's okay, but find the few that you can be effective on and pick them accordingly to what serves you best from a client perspective and from an awareness perspective. One of the usual places but very important places is LinkedIn. That's true at a corporate level, a firm level, and at a personal level, that you need to have an active and engaged profile. It's where professionals engage with one another. It's where they may come to find out news and information, specifically about work that's happening that you might be working on. So, it's a critical one.
Patience Jones: Instagram is also very important, especially because the output of what you do is primarily visual and experiential. Company LinkedIn, or company Instagram for sure. You need to be engaged. Your company needs to have one. Your firm needs to have one. If you have a personal Instagram and you want to drive people to it, that's a personal choice. You can do that; just know that whatever you put up is something that a prospective client might be seeing.
Brian Jones: Pinterest is another one. This is very true in the building materials side of things, but in the architecture space, this also can be equally effective, especially if you're in a residential firm. There are any number of things that would be searched because Pinterest is increasingly becoming a search engine for finding professionals.
Patience Jones: And because of its mood board sort of format, I guess. When we say “Pinterest,” often people are like, "That's for cake recipes and knitting projects." And yes, but also, it's a really useful tool for creating boards for your clients, for creating showcases of work that you've done, walkthroughs of projects, both that you can direct prospects to and that people will find on their own.
Brian Jones: Facebook is the originator of social media. But in terms of being a useful corporate platform, probably not as much because you may have to advertise in order to be seen. But from a recruiting standpoint, there is still some value in having a semi-active presence; if you have an engaged user base, you may get some organic reach out of it that doesn't require a paid investment.
Patience Jones: If you're going to use Facebook as a recruiting tool, make sure that you're putting up posts occasionally about your workplace culture and what it's like to work there so that your entire Facebook feed is not job adverts. That can make it look like you're struggling as a business.
Brian Jones: Also, it gives nobody any information about anything.
Patience Jones: Right.
Brian Jones: TikTok.
Patience Jones: Oh, yes. TikTok. So, company TikTok can be very impactful, depending on who you're trying to reach. Depending on your areas of practice, the types of projects you do, who the decision-makers are, you have to sort of be okay with living in that gray area, the Schrödinger's cat model of social media where, like, "Is it banned? Is it not banned? We don't know." It's not banned currently. It could get banned at any point. You just have to be okay with, "If we're using this, we're using it for now, and if we can't use it anymore, then we won't use it anymore."
Brian Jones: I would say a nice side hustle to the TikTok would be really thinking about YouTube, because I think that it is the second-most trafficked site on the web. It is social media. It may not naturally strike people as social media, but it absolutely is social media. If you're reticent about TikTok, then put that energy into something on YouTube, and that might be a good alternative.
Patience Jones: That's a really good point, especially because Google owns YouTube now. When Google is prioritizing how sites appear in search engine rankings, YouTube is going to be up there pretty high. And effective presence on YouTube can also help your website's SEO. But I digress.
Brian Jones: The unappreciated social site would be Reddit, but it still has a lot of value in thinking about it. It's definitely a tool that people use to verify things and to find out more deep information about places. Having some active presence, and this is probably more at a personal level rather than a firm level because I think firms commenting on things is never a good practice, but from a personal level, you can become seen as an expert by providing information within communities that exist that are looking to have answers to things.
Patience Jones: The beauty of Reddit is that for the most part, it is people who are looking for different kinds of information and people who are willing to give that information. You can always tell when somebody's going into a Reddit forum with very salesy mindset, and their posts usually get flagged and they get banned or shadowbanned and people don't like them. So don't be that person. What you don't want to do is go into a forum and be like, "Hey, guys, I'm an architect. Are you looking for an architecture firm? My firm's amazing. It's the best firm." Let's say you do affordable housing development, and somebody's talking about affordable housing and how projects get developed, maybe you go in and you say, "Oh, I'm an architect at such-and-such firm. We work on a lot of these types of projects, and one of the themes that we're seeing throughout them is X," or, "One of the biggest challenges in designing them is Y." This is how you use Reddit. You share information. You don't go in to sell. The other thing that's great about Reddit is that you can see what people's pain points are. People talk about their problems, so many problems, on Reddit. You can really see, what are people struggling with? What are people worried about in projects, in cities, in finance? And whether you interact with those people or not, this is helpful knowledge to have.
Brian Jones: Absolutely. And kind of rounding out the list is not a true social platform, but really just a promotional element, which would be Google My Business, which is now called Business Profiles or something like that.
Patience Jones: Yeah, I feel like it changes all the time. It used to be called your Google Knowledge Card. Basically, if you look for your firm on Google, there's a window that comes up on the right side of the browser panel, and it will list information about your company. It will have links to your website. It'll have your phone number. We've talked about this a little bit before, but if your firm doesn't currently "own" that profile, there's a process you can go through with Google to own that profile. It's free. And when you own it, it allows you to update the information that's in there to, one, make sure it's accurate, and, two, to post updates about your firm or projects that you're working on or promotions within your firm. So, when somebody, let's say, Googles your firm, they get the same information on the right side, but they also get a little blurb that says, "X architecture firm opens Dallas office." This is a good way to get more people knowing more about your firm.
Brian Jones: It is officially, as of today, called Google Business Profile.
Patience Jones: Oh, thank you. By the time this gets out, it may well have a different name, but-
Brian Jones: It's had many.
Patience Jones: So, those are the places you should think about being. Where don't you need to be? I'm going to start this one off because I like to call this “yelling pits”: any social media forum, the stated or lived purpose of which is to yell and scream, for people to vent, for people to just go on tirades about things. No one's listening. Everybody's speaking. That's not a good use of your time on any front.
Brian Jones: No. The other is if there's a channel, and this is sort of where Facebook falls into this category, is that at one point, it was very popular. Right now, it's probably less so. That kind of is the reevaluation that you're going through on a pretty regular basis: "Are we seeing results or an effective reach by engaging in this platform?"
Patience Jones: Do you need to be on Friendster? No. Do you need to be on MySpace? Probably not.
Brian Jones: Absolutely not.
Patience Jones: Need to be on Google+? You can't be. Channels where you only see other architects. You can be on these channels if you want to, for sure, but unless your business is based on referrals from other architects that may not help you.
Brian Jones: Or you're trying to do recruiting.
Patience Jones: Yes, provided that the channel is something that the level of employee you're looking to recruit would be on that channel.
Brian Jones: Very key. Very key.
Patience Jones: What do you need to do on these channels to be successful?
Brian Jones: You need to post on the channel in the way that it was intended. For instance, Instagram is a primarily visual and video format. Other channels are more text-based. Thinking about the kinds of content that you share and the best way to use that platform in the way that it was intended is key.
Patience Jones: To your point about being primarily professional, putting all your family photos from your summer vacation on LinkedIn is... it's not going to get you kicked off, but it may get people to stop following you and to just sort of scroll past anything that you have to say.
Brian Jones: I would say the other big one is to consistently appear in social. It's easy to get in the day-to-day of your work and say, "Oh, I'll get to that later." And then two months have gone by and you haven't posted anything. And it's like anything in your professional life, it has to be scheduled out.
Patience Jones: You want to make sure you're bringing something to the table, and every post that you do doesn't have to be the most groundbreaking, innovative, insightful thing. But it shouldn't just be self-promotion.
Brian Jones: No.
Patience Jones: If every post that you make is about something you did and something you achieved and how great you are, or the humble brag. It's like nested in a topic of something else, but really, all it is is a conduit for you to announce that you achieved something or other. People just get bored by that. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't tout your achievements, but you also need to mix it up with other types of posts and with engaging with other people and congratulating them on their achievements.
Brian Jones: And, architects, hear me, that's the key. Iif you're just posting a project photo and saying, "I'm excited that this project finished," and that's the sum total of your post, and that's all you ever post, other architects are also posting the same sort of post. To a non-architect, they may not be able to tell the difference between building A and building B, or firm A or firm B. It's not really helping you build the kind of awareness and uniqueness that you need. That is something to bear in mind.
Patience Jones: It's also a missed opportunity because, in that post, maybe you want to talk about a really important challenge that you overcame or a new method that you used or something that's really special about this particular building, or what it's going to be used for, or the effect it's going to have on the community. I mean, there's all different kinds of things you could talk about. Just saying, essentially, "Here's a picture," doesn't really do your work justice.
Brian Jones: You may have to tell the story multiple times. The number of times that I see a post that assumes that people will be paying attention for a long period of time, they won't. Try to tell a complete story each time that you're posting and not bank on the fact that, at some point down the road, somebody will come back and look at your social channel again.
Patience Jones: One last thing to be wary of is not just repeating everything that everyone else has already said. If there's something going on in your industry and somebody's talked about it, if you don't have something new to add to that conversation, it doesn't really make a lot of sense for you to go in and say exactly the same thing. It might be more appropriate for you to leave a comment on their post saying that you agree with them or saying how this has been true in your practice as well. But just repeating what somebody else has done doesn't really get anyone much. Which brings us to the sharing and commenting. It's really important to congratulate people and to show genuine interest in what they're doing. Comments are not always a springboard for talking about your own accomplishment. And the number of times I have seen somebody announce on LinkedIn that they got a new job or they got a new promotion, and then somewhere in the thread, somebody leaves a comment that's like, "Oh my gosh, so funny. I got promoted last week too. Congratulations." It's not about you. It's about this other person. And it's important to be generous, and it's important to be thoughtful, and it's important not to hijack threads. If somebody from a competing firm offers their opinion about something, going in and picking a fight with them on LinkedIn does not make you look like a super knowledgeable expert. It makes you look like a jerk.
Brian Jones: Yep.
Patience Jones: So, how do we get started in a non-jerk sort of way?
Brian Jones: First of all is figuring out your approach. Once you figure out your approach, then you need to set a schedule that's manageable for you. Recognize that social media has a pretty short shelf life and not getting caught up and revisiting what you've posted and trying to perfect a post. They are imperfect elements by their nature.
Patience Jones: Yes, they are meant to be temporal. While they live forever, you know, be mindful of that. It's not like you're writing the Great American Novel.
Brian Jones: No.
Patience Jones: You do your best, you put it out there, and you move on. Don't sit at your computer and keep hitting refresh to see how many likes you have, or analyze who liked it and who didn't. Just move on.
Brian Jones: And recognize that the way that the algorithms work, they reward attention. Just because somebody didn't like something that you did doesn't mean that a bunch of people weren't shown your post. Anytime anybody pauses on a piece of content, they're more likely to be shown something similar via the next post. Likes don't matter as much as they maybe once did, because people aren't as willing to give them away.
Patience Jones: Really important point. Just because somebody doesn't hit the “like” button doesn't mean that they didn't engage with your content, that it didn't resonate with them, that they didn't make a mental note and think, "We should put that person on our outreach list," or, "That's somebody I want to consider for something." People have fatigue.
Brian Jones: And that's especially true on LinkedIn, because of the way that LinkedIn displays the fact that you “liked” something. It almost becomes an endorsement of whatever it is. It's a lot harder sometimes to get people to like things.
Patience Jones: I muted somebody finally, because I think they liked every post that was ever made on LinkedIn. Every time I looked at my feed, it was, "This person liked this post. This person liked this post." And it would display the posts that they liked, and it had nothing to do with anything that I was interested in. I didn't know any of these people. I didn't care. So, my entire feed was basically a duplicate of this person's feed, and I just don't want to live like that.
Brian Jones: Yep.
Patience Jones: So I muted them. And I think other people are afraid of that too. They're conscious of the fact that whatever they like will get in somebody else's feed.
Brian Jones: The final thing I would say is, make sure that you have some sort of measurement in place to understand what's working and what's not and to refine and improve as you go. They are imperfect pieces, but you should be aiming to improve as you go so that you are posting things that get better consumption and better engagement from people.
Patience Jones: That can be tweaking everything from what you're saying, to how you're saying it, to what your visuals are-
Brian Jones: To the kinds of things that you talk about.
Patience Jones: I don't know how well known it is at this point, but when you include a link in your original post, LinkedIn tends to deprioritize that in people's feeds because it's a link that takes you out of LinkedIn. If you leave that link in as a comment to your own post, then your post doesn't get deprioritized. In practice, it, it looks weird, and people don't tend to like it. They tend to prefer if you put the link in your actual post. But that's something else that you can tweak or play around with and say, "Okay, if we do some of these posts this way and some of these posts this way." Look at it as an ongoing experiment.
