Social media for HVAC companies whose buyers are building engineers

Film the mechanical room, and never film the lobby

Access inside occupied buildings is escorted and permissioned, so what you may publish is decided before you arrive rather than after you edit.

A building engineer walks you in, stands with you, and walks you out. Nothing about that visit is yours to publish, and the written yes you need comes from the manager or the association, not from the resident whose unit you were standing in.

Ask when the work gets scheduled, not when the truck is at the loading dock. Requests like this get routed through a management company and sometimes past a board, and an answer takes a week even when the answer is friendly.

The lobby, the address plaque and the view out of a unit window are the three shots that identify a property in about a second. Each one is the association's call to publish, and none of them is yours.

Some buildings say no permanently. Others say yes to the mechanical room and no to anything above it. Keep a short list of the ones that have already agreed in writing, because those are the properties your camera can actually live in.

A vendor who posts recognizable footage of a building without asking often stops being a vendor. Losing an account over a video happens here, which is why the rule belongs in writing rather than in the judgment of whoever is holding the phone.

Spanish is the language of the post, not a caption under an English one

A great deal of this market lives and buys in Spanish, and translated English reads as translated English to everybody who does.

Record the technician explaining the job in the language he would use on site. In Hialeah, in Little Havana, in much of Doral, that is Spanish, and the clip is stronger for it.

Subtitle in the other language rather than reshooting. Two audiences, one production run, and neither version sounds like it came out of a marketing department.

Haitian Creole matters in parts of the county too, particularly around Little Haiti and further north. A technician who speaks it is an asset almost nobody in your competitive set is using.

Comments are where this becomes real. A Spanish question answered in English by a scheduling app ends the conversation, so route those to a person who actually speaks it.

The night the crane comes is the only show the whole building watches

Rooftop and central plant equipment in a tower arrives by crane on a closed street in the small hours, and it is the one piece of your work an entire building already knows about.

A chiller or a packaged rooftop unit going into a Brickell or Edgewater tower is a rigging job before it is a mechanical one. The street closes, the pick happens overnight, and residents who have never once thought about the equipment above them are at the window watching it go up.

So film it. The staging, the rigging, the old machine coming off, the new one landing. It reads as competence to a board member in a way a photograph of a finished install never will.

When a pick is impossible the story is better still. A machine broken into sections, carried up in a freight elevator and rebuilt in a room with a door narrower than the equipment, is the kind of thing engineers send to each other.

Ask about the camera when you ask about the lift. Approval to close a street and approval to publish are two different conversations with two different people, and the second one is much easier a week early than at midnight.

Keep the skyline anonymous. A crane against the water at three in the morning belongs to you. A crane with an address behind it belongs to the association.

Boards release money on a meeting schedule, not on a hot afternoon

Condominium association approval sits between your quote and the work, and a board decides on dates that were set months ago.

Budget workshops, annual meetings, reserve discussions and the run-up to a recertification are the moments a building actually talks about mechanical money. Everything in between is a conversation about a conversation.

Publish the heavy material before those dates. A plain explanation of what deferred chiller maintenance does to a building lands very differently in the weeks a board is writing next year's numbers than it does in August.

Ask the managers you already work with when their annual meeting falls. Buildings across Miami-Dade do not share a calendar, so the useful version of this is a list of your own properties and their dates rather than a season.

Hold two or three explainers evergreen. Boards turn over, and next year a different set of owners arrives with the same questions about the same equipment.

What to film, who should hold the camera and what to do with a post that works are the same in Hialeah as they are in Denver, so we wrote those down once on our HVAC social media page instead of repeating them here.