5 ways Small Businesses can Improve their Social Media Presence
1.) Establish your Brand & Audience
What kind of business do you want to represent on Instagram? This is based on what your feel like your brand represents and whom your audience is. If you are a young hip soda shop then maybe your audience is teenagers or college students or maybe you are a classic ice cream shop and your audience is families. Whatever your brand is or whomever your audience may be, knowing those two things are crucial to effectively have a steady social media presence targeted towards the right kind of people on social media. Do some research as to whom your audience is on social media by using your analytics which we will elaborate on later.
2.) Stepping up your Posts
Let’s take your posts to the next level! People often follow food business pages to know when are sales going on and to see yummy images of the items you sell. As far as photo posts go, try to step out of the norm of the posts you do, try simplifying the background, try using people or hands in the shot holding the product, or even show action shots of your employees doing different steps of the process to create the product. If you are willing to experiment even further, video is very successful and eye catching on social media, find one of your employee who would be willing to create a few short videos for you! Try doing videos of you scooping ice cream into the cone, or show satisfying videos of rolling ice cream, experiment with “boomerangs”* which can be interesting or lastly maybe putting together one of the items on your menu from start to finish. Hopefully, some of these ideas will get you started, if you need more help finding ideas, find some other businesses who sell similar products and get ideas from there.
3.) Being Present
Being present on social media is super important! There are plenty of ways to do this but we will talk about 3 ways today which include: actively liking and commenting, interacting and using Instagram stories.
- The first way is to actively like and comment on your followers content. Doing this helps your followers remember your page. This will set you apart from other business pages and people will also be more likely to like and comment on your content after you’ve done so.
- The next way is to interact. For example, When people comment on your photos reply to their comment or when a person follows you, follow them back. Then people know you are active on social media and know there are real people running the brand.
- Lastly use Instagram stories, which can be a great way for your customers to see content in real time. For example you can post Instagram stories announcing sales, showing different products, or helping explain your business. These stories can even be saved to your highlights if it’s a story that could help a new customer coming to your page. Testing out different things can help your small business improve your social media presence.
4.) Find New People to Follow
When you are looking to find new followers to grow your page, these tips are guaranteed to help! One way to find new customers is know your audiences demographic. Then thinking about your audience think about what other local places they might be following. Go to a social media page of a fellow local business, go through their follower list and follow people who fall in your audience demographic. Another way is to find hashtags of local places or things relevant to your shop such as #vegassmoothies or #sandiegoicecream. Use those hashtags to find people which have posted content similar to what you sell and follow those people then you can also follow the people who liked the content which had the relevant hashtag. Now, not everyone of those people will follow you back but by having an active social media presence, people will know who you are to follow you.
5.) Use Analytics
Lastly analytics can be super helpful. As long as you have 100 followers you can view demographics about your audience such as age, gender and most active days and hours. Use information such as gender and age to determine the type of content you might post. If your audience is families, then post pictures of groups having a good time at your shop, or little kids enjoying what you sell. If your audience is college kids, maybe show a couple on a casual date or a few people having a good time together enjoying some of your delicious treats. Then view the days that are most popular, and the hours that your audience is most active. Use that information to help you determine when to post content so your audience is more likely to see it and engage with it.
Hopefully some of these tips were new information and will be helpful. Test a few out, see what works for your business and helps you improve your social media presence. We have a facebook group for ice cream business owners, where you can ask questions and other ice cream business owners can respond. If you would like to be apart of our Facebook group for Ice cream business owners, you can let us know what worked for you or didn’t and ask any other questions you might have!
*Boomerang: a boomerang is a video which shoots for a couple of seconds and then it shows the video play regular and then reverses the videos and then continues to repeat.
