Balfour Beatty tops contractors’ social media rankings

Balfour Beatty has more Twitter followers and Facebook fans than any other UK construction contractor. It also comes out top on Instagram.

Kier, BAM and Willmott Dixon also score highly. Vinci and Keller, on the other hand, are barely even trying.

The study was conduct by digital marketing specialist Arvid Linde of Bournemouth-based LexisClick. He analysed the social media presence of the Top 20 contractors, looking at their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube activities. LinkedIn was excluded as a given in the corporate world.

Regarding Facebook, Arvid Linde says: “Balfour Beatty stands out in terms of content format. They are using their 8K-strong Facebook following to gain extra subscribers to their Youtube channel. Even their CTA button links to a video instead of the more traditional B2B approach to use ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Call Us’ as the Facebook CTA.”

He adds: “Carillon is using their Facebook stream to showcase various professions and to promote apprenticeships. Morrison Utility on the other hand are taking a much more fun approach to their Facebook campaign.”

Kier gets credit for launching a mini site to help tell ordinary people about civil engineering and building bridges. “Unfortunately, they’ve gone about it the wrong way,” he says. “The minisite is hosted on Blogspot – one of the un-coolest social sites ever conceived. I’d get it if they had built it in Tumblr because then they’d at least enjoy some interaction from other platform users.”

Those companies that use Instagram are generally doing a reasonably good job, Mr Linde says. “What they lack, though, is a good mix of topics. Balfour Beatty is good at instagrid, ISG can make their staff look fun and relatable, Murphy Group have allegedly the most beautiful bulldozers in Britain while Laing O’Rourke and BAM have a special talent for delivering top-notch urban photography. If you mixed the five, you’d have a perfect B2B Instagram account. On their own they're just not good enough to warrant thousands of followers.”

His full analysis can be seen at https://www.lexisclick.com/blog/builders-cracked-construction-industry-social-media

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