Social media is a massive community of people. And even the most conservative estimates show that over 2 billion people use social media regularly. That means over 25% of all human beings use social media. Mind blown, huh?
Ok, so those are big numbers. But what about your audience of contractors? I mean, there are a lot of them, but they are just a tiny, tiny portion of the 2 billion active social media users.
Do they even use social media? Is it worth your time?
Frankly put, yes. But you probably want proof. So let’s look at a few stats from the 2015 Equipment World Connectivity Study.
[box]FYI: This will be getting a little wonky. I’m going to use quite a few numbers and percentages, but I promise it’s worth your time.[/box]
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1. Social Media Usage Growth
Over the past year, we’ve found that social media usage is growing among contractors. And this isn’t just among the people working on a job site. Social media usage has grown among the people who are actually making decisions at contracting firms and companies.
70.2% of survey respondents were upper management, particularly VP or higher.
Since we released the 2014 Equipment World Connectivity Study, social media usage has grown by about 8% year over year. That’s impressive growth over a single audience, especially when you take into account the average age is 54.7 years old.
It’s worth noting here that even though only about 45.1% of contractors report social media usage, this can be a misleading number. There are 729,345 construction companies in the United States. These companies employ over 7 million employees, and many need multiple pieces of equipment and other products and services to function.
While 45.1% may not sound like a lot, we’re still talking about hundreds of thousands of businesses and executives.
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2. Facebook Reigns Supreme
This is kind of a no-brainer. Facebook is the largest social media network on the planet. It makes sense that it would have the highest usage among contractors, or any audience in general.
According to our research, 94.2% of contractors who use social media visit Facebook.
Digging into those numbers, contractors who use Facebook are highly engaged. About 70% of these users access the platform daily (with almost ⅓ of that number visiting several times a day). Twitter is the next closest, but they have far fewer users.
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3. YouTube is Up-and-Coming
We’ve been talking about how awesome YouTube is for a while. In fact, I’ve written a lot about video content and how to reach contractors on YouTube. It turns out, the stats actually agree with me.
YouTube usage has experienced a 6% growth year over year.
Of the contractors who use social media, YouTube has the second highest usage ratings, at around 62%. It’s a distant second to Facebook. It has high engagement rates, with about 81% using the platform daily or weekly, and the numbers to leverage the platform.
Additionally, YouTube is the biggest video hosting site on the web. Just because a contractor isn’t going to YouTube, doesn’t mean they aren’t still seeing YouTube videos.
