Facebook, Twitter and Google +, OH MY!

Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare…feeling overwhelmed yet?  With all the social media mediums available how do you begin to understand what platforms to participate to grow your business?  Let’s say I am a new cupcake and treat bakery in downtown Chicago called Yumazing.  Cupcakeries are a hot trend, so how am I going to set myself apart?  I need to create awareness, get customers in the door, generate buzz and then maintain loyalty to keep them coming back.

As a business owner I have to look at my business model, profile my customer base, investigate exactly where my customers are hanging out online, and decide what social spaces are going to reach the many.  What is important to understand is that you don’t have to participate in every social space to be relevant. Participate only with select platforms that you are going to garner the best exposure and do them well. 

The goal is to create conversations that are in line with your business objectives.  Create these conversations by publishing content that is going to get your followers to interact. Remember content without conversation is just broadcasting (Novak, 2010).  For a cupcakery, which post do you think is going to be more engaging?

      A)   We have a new cupcake today

      B)   We have a new chocolate cheesecake #cupcake at @Yumazing, come in today, show us your tweet and try it for free

      When crafting posts, ask yourself if this is a conversation starter.  Try some of these best practices for engagement:

1. Use rich media within your posts to make them engaging.
2. Solve problems with posts – a way to improve their daily life.
3. Use your fans’ content to make them feel part of your brand.
4. Involve customers with a question.
5. Let them fill in the blank –______ will satisfy my sweet tooth today.
6. Photo caption posts with the allure of photos with people’s love of interacting with brands they identify with – do this to trigger emotion.
7. Tie your brand with quotes that support your campaign goals and use visuals with your quotes.
8. Ask your fans to do something.  Come in today.  Vote with like versus share for an option A or B.
9. Use hashtags to categorize terms to increase brand, product and campaign awareness to wider audiences (Bunskoek, (2013).

Allocating your resources

Ideally, the person who is managing your advertising and public relations will be the person driving the messaging with social media sharing - you want your marketing campaigns to run in parallel.  For a small start-up business like Yumazing, social media management might come directly from the store manager or might be best outsourced to a third-party, so bakery management can better focus on running the day-to-day business activities.  As an example for Yumazing, if I get feature story in Confectioners Magazine, I might advertising in that issue, link that article to the News section of my website and share a link to the article on my website via my social channels.  This, my friend, is what we call Integrated Marketing Communications.

What platforms are Yumazing?

More than 500 million people use Facebook globally and almost half log into their account each day (Facebook, 2013).  The ability to connect with your community through your news feed to keep your business in front of people to inform, engage and share. You can communicate the cupcake flavor of the day, or engage by decorating themed cupcakes for holidays, contests or partnering with local events to capture the attention of the community.

Twitter is like a mini blog allowing you to send a message burst 140 characters in length at a time.  People can follow your business on Twitter and your business can follow others.  This allows you to read, reply to and easily share tweets with your followers (retweet).  In a post, you may link content to a URL, video or photo, so it is ideal for driving traffic to your website or blog.  Being a local business, Yumazing can leverage Twitter’s Advanced Search feature to find potential customers that work or live near your business by identifying location by city or zip code.

Instagram is growing at a rate of more than 100 million new users per year (Reed, 2013). Instagram structures content locally through two methods; first, users can activate location through the Photo Map feature. This attaches a geocode to each piece of content, giving users the ability to view their photos and videos on a map and providing vital context to these precious moments and experiences. Secondly, users can “location tag” content, which attaches the explicit place where the photo or video was taken (Reed, 2013).  What does this mean for a small business?  One might share a picture of their cupcake, share an event where they are eating the featured cupcake or take a video of a cupcake review.  These occurrences infuse the content they share with local relevance, and for many, the Facebook page becomes the distribution channel then shares with a wider pool of friends on two platforms.

YouTube, the number one search engine on the web.  What’s the adage?  A picture is worth 1,000 words, however, video can tell you so much more.  YouTube makes it so easy to upload, share and embed video. Yumazing can benefit from YouTube by sharing local or media events, giving behind the scenes footage of how they get that peanut butter center in their chocolate cupcake or a testimonial from someone significant.

Tips for success

Maintaining a social media plan is not small potatoes. Keeping up with the latest features of each platform, understanding how devices work with them and building a content calendar that aligns with your business objectives is a continual, dynamic process.  It is vital that your brand presence across each social platform you participate maintain the same look and feel to help people identify your business and build trust (Kingston, 2013).

Now you have a content calendar, you are seeing likes, comments, retweets and shares and feeling pretty good about your efforts. So you think I have this social media thing in the bag?  We’ll, not quite.  The key to making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say about you, analyzing the data and using these insights to know your customers better to improve your marketing strategy (Brandwatch, n.d.). Some free tools include Google Analytics and Wildfire – you can also use HootSuite to automate and measure the engagement of your activity.  If you can get yourself in the routine of building your content calendar based on what you have learned through your analytics, you can identify what types of posts result in the most stickiness and deliver on what your followers desire.