Last week, SEIA presented a great video webinar about solar social media, a rare topic in the solar webinar world. In case you missed it, the full video is below.
Speaking on Google+ Hangout (a free webinar service) were solar marketing pros David Almacy, senior vice president of international PR firm Edelman; Jason Deelstra, marketing director at Vivint Solar; Miguel Yupangco the digital media manager at Solar Mosaic; Susanna Murley, digital media director at SEIA; and Kenny Gayles, the social media and grassroots coordinator for SEIA.
Susanna Mulrey moderated the panel, which gave viewers many great insights and examples of how solar social media tactics can build brand recognition and leads for solar businesses. Here’s the entire video:
Among the take-aways:
- Vivint Solar uses social media to engage existing customers to give testimonials about their Vivint experience, and they share that on their various social media channels.
- Solar Mosaic likes to use visual virtual postcards that can easily be read and shared on Facebook , LinkedIn, and other social networks.
- Edleman’s Almacy stresses that you need to have a strategy before you start Tweeting away. What are your goals? Customer engagement? Lead generation? He also stresses the importance of sharing useful, diverse, content. Your posts shouldn’t just be all about you and your products.
- Choose your social media channels carefully. Don’t try to have a presence in every social media platform out there. Just decide what’s the best tool to reach your customers and accomplish your goals, and then try your best to connect with those customers on your selected platforms.
- Keep mobile in mind. That is, more and more people are interacting on social media on their iPhones and tablets, so it’s important to optimize websites for the mobile space. That also may mean shorter videos and content, since people reading on mobile devices have even shorter attention spans than people reading on the Web.
- Since social media is virtually free except for one’s time, the panelists said that social media ROI should be based on better customer engagement derived from the message that you put out. Each communication message, whether blogs, Twitter, or videos, needs to have an underlying purpose in mind with a desired customer action at the end.
These types of specific solar marketing forums are rare in the solar industry, so find time to go through this video and garner your own solar social media take-aways for your own solar businesses. It’s great way… to UnThink Solar.