New York, NY

Social media for window and door work in occupied buildings

Almost every rule of thumb in this trade assumes a house with a driveway. Here the crew parks where it can, waits on a freight elevator somebody reserved a week ago, and works in an apartment with neighbors on the other side of the wall and another building close enough to see into. All of it changes what can be filmed, who is watching and what a viewer needs to see before they will call. The openings are real, and most of them are questions nobody in this market has bothered to answer on camera: what happens to the guards, what the hallway looks like at five, and whether new sash will read right from the sidewalk.

The window guard is the first question on every occupied job

Guards come off and go back on, and no landlord or parent is booking anything until somebody explains how.

Apartments with young children carry window guards, and this city takes that seriously enough that landlords and half the parents in a building ask about them before they ask about glass.

The question is always practical. Do the guards come off, who puts them back, does the new unit take the same guard, and what happens in the hours between the old sash coming out and the new one going in.

Film the answer once and it will work for years. A guard coming off, the opening worked, the guard back on and pulled against, and somebody saying plainly who does that and when. A clip on that subject gets forwarded between a managing agent and a tenant more than anything else you publish.

Say what your crew does on the day and let the obligation questions go to whoever owns them. The caller is asking about the morning of the install, not about a rule, and the morning is the part you can speak to with total authority.

It sorts your inquiries too. An owner who watches you handle guards without being prompted assumes you have worked occupied buildings before, which is the thing they spend the first minute of every call trying to establish.

Everyone on the floor is watching the job whether you post it or not

In an occupied building the neighbors experience your work directly, and their verdict circulates before you have edited a single clip.

In a suburb nobody sees an install. In a walk-up the whole landing hears the demolition, walks past your drop cloths and steps around your debris on the way to work.

So the footage that helps most is the protection. Elevator pads, covering down the hallway, containment at the apartment door, the corridor swept before the crew leaves for the day.

Shareholders and owners pass that material around inside their own buildings, which is the point. A board member watching hallway protection done properly is worth more to you than a stranger watching a finished window.

Shoot the corridor while the crew is packing up rather than before anyone starts. A hallway that looks untouched at five, after units have been carried through it since morning, argues for you in a way no clean before shot can.

The elevator earns the same treatment. Pads hung, the car released on schedule and swept out is a short clip that a managing agent in Forest Hills or Riverdale reads instantly and a homeowner would never think to ask for.

At this window your camera is pointed into somebody else's apartment

Courtyards and airshafts put another household a few feet from the opening you are filming, and that household did not hire you.

Point a phone out of a prewar apartment across a courtyard or an airshaft and you are recording a stranger's kitchen. Across a lot of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens the facing building is close enough to read a calendar on the wall.

The person who complains is rarely the neighbor. It is the managing agent, and an agent who has had to field that call has a reason to prefer somebody else for the next building in the portfolio.

So look through the glass before you record rather than after. Frame up, frame down, frame across the opening, or wait until the light has moved. The discipline is not aesthetic, it is about keeping an account you spent years earning.

Sound travels the same way. A courtyard carries a conversation from four floors up, and a recording made at an open window in July collects a neighbor's television along with your narration.

None of it applies on the street side, where anything visible from a public sidewalk is fair game. Knowing which side of the apartment you are standing on is most of the rule.

On a landmarked block the question is whether it will read right from the sidewalk

Matching an existing profile is the job in a historic district, and it is a visual argument that belongs on camera rather than in a paragraph.

A brownstone owner is not shopping for a window. She is trying to work out whether the new one will look wrong from across the street, and no specification sheet has ever answered that question for anybody.

So shoot the comparison. Original sash and the replacement side by side, the width of the sightline, the depth of the muntin, the way each pane holds a reflection at the same hour of the same day.

Film it from the sidewalk as well as from the room. The window that matters on a landmarked block is the one seen from the street, so take the shot from the opposite curb at the distance a neighbor actually stands.

That footage does work you did not plan for. An owner three doors down recognizes her own facade in it, and a managing agent with prewar buildings in Park Slope or the Upper West Side learns you can match a profile without having to be told.

The decisions that would be identical in any market, like who belongs on camera and what to do with a clip that travels, live on our window and door social media page at /industries/window-door-replacement/social-media.

Questions we actually get

Boards and managing agents decide everything here. Why would social media matter?: Because boards and agents are people who read the same feeds as everybody else. An agent choosing between two contractors is looking for evidence you have worked a building like theirs and will not create problems in the hallway, and that evidence is exactly what this content produces. It will not shorten an approval, and anybody promising that is selling. What it does is make you the familiar name when the packet lands on somebody's desk.
The building told us not to film in the common areas. Does that kill the protection footage?: It kills the hallway shots and nothing else. Work from the apartment doorway out, film the threshold, the containment, the covering inside the unit and the debris going into bags, and describe the corridor discipline in the caption instead of showing it. Ask the managing agent in writing rather than the morning of the job, because buildings differ and the ones that say no to a hallway often have no view at all about the apartment itself.
Our units go up on a hoist from the street rather than up the stairs. Is that worth filming?: It is some of the most watchable footage available to this trade and almost nobody publishes it. A unit rising past three floors of windows explains, without a word, why a job in this city is scheduled the way it is and why a crew cannot simply turn up an hour late. Keep the camera on the load and the opening rather than on the sidewalk, and it is a clip you will use for years.
Half our work is in prewar buildings with a radiator under every window. Is there content in that?: Yes, and it is content only a New York contractor can make. Show how a unit lands with a steam riser staying exactly where it is, what the sill under an enclosure looks like when the enclosure finally comes off, how the trim closes back around it. A prewar owner recognizes her own apartment in three seconds, and she has been told by two other companies that her window is a standard replacement.
We work in apartments full of somebody's furniture. Does that look bad on camera?: It looks like this city, which is the point. A viewer here has already worked out that her sofa is three feet from the opening and wants to know what you do about it. Show the wrapping, the floor covering, the path from the door to the window and the room put back at the end. A pristine empty room reads as somebody else's job, and it quietly tells a New York buyer that you have not worked hers.

What is different here

Product approval is the part of this market that genuinely changes between counties. Miami-Dade and Broward sit inside the High Velocity Hurricane Zone and generally work through Miami-Dade Notices of Acceptance, while Palm Beach County work is usually documented under statewide Florida Product Approval against a local design wind speed. The two are not interchangeable on a permit, so approval language is a compliance statement rather than a marketing one, and it is worth having a dealer check their own documentation before it goes on a page.

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Social Media Strategy & Execution for other New York industries

Window & Door Replacement Social Media Strategy & Execution elsewhere

Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

Talk to us about social media for impact window and door dealers in New York

Tell us what you are working with and we will say what we would do first, and what we would leave alone. A real answer, not a pitch deck.