IDSN530-Technology Essentials

Challenges faced by construction companies in using social media

• Growing technology: World is moving at very fast speed and the acceleration is given by internet, rapid innovations, technology improvements, etc. With regards to this, every industry is adopting trending measures in order to cope up with the external business requirements. Internet is one of the most powerful tools which is used by the business organizations to transact in B2B and in B2C markets, in terms of promotion and advertisement, communicating with the customers, conducting market research, analysing demands and wants of target customers, etc. In relation to this, construction companies are also using internet mainly for advertisement and promotion purpose.
• Vast platform:They are mainly using social media platforms as these are the cheapest and most effective mediums of advertisement and promotion. Along with advertisement and promotion, construction companies are also using social media platforms for enhancing customer engagement and for building trust amongst the customers by resolving queries and providing appropriate support (Breese, 2018). Apart from this, there are numerous other benefits of using social media platforms for construction companies. On the other hand, there are several limitations, issues and challenges with respect to the usage of social media for construction companies.
• Developing social media strategy: This is one of the most severe challenges for construction industry to form social media strategy. Social media strategy is the summary of whole information regarding organization along with developing plans to attain objectives. Operations of construction companies are broad and wide and explaining everything through social media platforms is bit difficult, thus, developing social media strategy is bit difficult (Leeds, 2016).
• Measuring Social Media ROI: Social media ROI is what business gets in return from the time, money and resources invested towards social media marketing. Although, social media strategies are considered as effective approaches for spreading awareness amongst the larger area of the target market but analysing the return is bit difficult and in order to make appropriate utilisation of social media strategies, it is necessary design the goals through which ROI could be measured.
• Turning employees into brand advocates:While moving towards making online presence, construction companies seeks for spreading awareness amongst the target audience. This task becomes easy when employees of the organization are given rights to develop appropriate slogans for the brand promotion. These messages should be capable enough to attract customers (Perera, Victoria & Brand, 2015).  
• Selection of social media platforms:Social media penetration is very high and approximately 2.6 billion people are active users of social media platforms across the globe. Mostly, social media users are youngsters and people average aged 16-35. While construction companies’ target audience does not matches up with the age group social media users, thus, it becomes difficult for the companies in construction industry to choose appropriate social media platforms (Grover & Froese, 2016).
• Content used in promotional campaigns:Social media platforms are effective and appropriate for industries like retail, manufacturing, etc. because they have various products and services to promote. On the other hand, construction companies did not able to promote their products on social media platforms due to non-availability of much creative content for promoting big buildings, lands, etc. (Ruths & Pfeffer, 2014).
• Approaching to the target audience: Construction industry’s target audience falls under the age group of 35-60 and the number of social media users in this age group are relatively less. Thus, it becomes difficult for the construction companies to approach to its target audience through social media platforms and they need to move towards offline media strategies such as television, newspaper, etc. (Gerbaudo, 2018).
• Increased cost: Though social media platforms are considered as the most effective platforms in terms of promotion, commination, engagement, etc. In order to approach to the target audience, companies needs to select both digital as well as offline mediums for making their promotional campaigns effective and it leads to increase the cost for the companies (Perrin, 2014).
• Increasing reachability:Social media platforms are meant for spreading awareness amongst the target audience regarding organizational products and services. As such construction companies do not have much information to share in their promotional campaigns. Thus, they showcase their past projects, achievements and other certain things in order to attract target audience towards their functionalities. The major issue faced by the companies in relation to the increasing reachability is lack of interesting and engaging content due to which their promotional campaigns becomes less effective (Wang, et. al., 2014).

References

Breese, J. 2018. 10 Social Media Challenges Your Business must overcome [online]. Available from: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-challenges/ [07/10/018].

Gerbaudo, P., 2018. Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. Pluto Press.

Grover, R. and Froese, T.M., 2016. Knowledge management in construction using a SocioBIM platform: A case study of AYO smart home project. Procedia Engineering, 145, pp.1283-1290.

Leeds, R. 2016. Top 4 Challenges Facing The Construction Industry [online]. Available from: https://www.digitalistmag.com/future-of-work/2016/08/15/top-4-challenges-facing-construction-industry-04388065 [07/10/2018].

Perera, S., Victoria, M.F. and Brand, S., 2015. Use of social media in construction industry: a case study. Pearson.

Perrin, A., 2015. Social media usage. Pew research center, pp.52-68.

Ruths, D. and Pfeffer, J., 2014. Social media for large studies of behavior. Science, 346(6213), pp.1063-1064.

Wang, Z., Joo, V., Tong, C. and Chan, D., 2014. Issues of social data analytics with a new method for sentiment analysis of social media data. In Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), 2014 IEEE 6th International Conference on (pp. 899-904). IEEE.