Enewsletters are great communications vehicles, but the place where real creativity is taking place is in the world of what is actively known as “social media.” Social media outlets present a fantastic opportunity for all small-business owners to meet and engage with targeted audiences full of thousands of potential customers. The cost of entry into this marketing channel is often only your time—however, don’t underestimate the cost of your time! If used correctly, participating in social media will help your business grow through powerful word-of-mouth campaigns. But beware. It can suck a lot of time out of your day.
To get started, there are a few things you should set up right away:
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“Twitter drives customer service in the digital age.”
—Harvard Business Review online “Your Company Should Be Helping Customers on Social” by Maher Masri, et al., 7/15/15
Facebook page. Like anything that has been around for a few years, people’s use of Facebook is changing and Facebook itself keeps making slight changes. Facebook keeps trying to engage more business uses, so pay attention to those and determine if they work for you. Some food businesses that make lunches, dinner-to-go, and bakery items post their changing menu every day on Facebook, allowing followers to plan to stop by on their way home to pick up a ready-made meal.
Twitter. Twitter has a more instant, fun feel to it. While you don’t have to be a stand-up comedian and post entertaining tweets, lighthearted and to the point (inherent in its 140-character limitation) is the name of the Twitter game.
Pinterest. Definitely start a Pinterest account and post gorgeous pictures of your beautiful food items. Get friends to start to follow you, and some of their friends will start to follow you. Post enough interesting things and Pinterest users you don’t know at all will start to follow you.
YouTube channel. This is probably most useful to food businesses that offer cooking classes or if you want to show how you make your products so unique.
These social media accounts will become useful tools for you to interact with your audience.
Here are eight tips on using social media to your advantage:
1. Before you start any social media outreach, define your target audiences. How old are they? Do the people in your audience tend to be more female than male? What groups, organizations, or associations are they likely to join? Are they foodies? Or just people who like to eat healthy or unique foods? Think about the kind of people you market to and want to use your business—then hang out with them via social media outlets.
2. Once your target audiences are defined, locate them online. Search Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest for groups, organizations, channels, or discussions that would contain the people you are looking to meet.
3. Use social media search and organizational tools to help you find your audiences. Some sites like Facebook and YouTube have great, built-in search functions that will help you find your audience. To find your audience on Twitter, try using external sites like www.Twibes.com.
4. Once you’ve found your audience on these sites, join their groups and lists so that you can follow the ongoing conversation. Do not jump right in with a sales pitch! Listen instead. Learn the etiquette and major players. Spend some time just following along.
5. After you’re familiar with the etiquette and people involved, jump into the conversation when and where appropriate. Do not hide who you are or the company you represent. Become a regular voice in the conversation and offer your friendly expertise to others. Invite people back to your website and social media accounts to see what it is you do and offer.
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“People under 35 spend almost four hours per day on social media . . . the volume of tweets targeted at brands . . . has grown 2.5 times in the past two years. The percentage of people who have used Twitter for customer service leapt nearly 70 percent between 2013 and 2014.”
—Harvard Business Review online “Your Company Should Be Helping Customers on Social” by Maher Masri, et al., 7/15/15
6. Once you’re a regular voice in the conversation, don’t be shy about doing a little promotion. Contests, giveaways, and raffles can be great tools for audience interaction and promotion of your products. People will love the chance to play in your contest and will invite friends to join in the fun.
7. As your audience grows, stay creative. Invent new ways to engage your audience and encourage them to invite their friends. Continue to avoid hard sales pitches. People do not forward commercials to their friends. They forward value.
8. Finally, do not try to do everything everywhere. Sometimes it seems there will soon be as many social media platforms as there are websites. To try to maintain a presence on all of them is unsustainable. Focus on the top two or three that have proven to contain the largest number of people in your target audience.
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Management tools like SocialOomph can schedule updates and get engagement stats to help keep up with your social media and estimate its impact.
Remember, social media provides you with the opportunity to meet your audience—not sell to your audience. People do not join these social media networks to find marketers. They join and participate for friendly interaction and the value that it adds to their day. Provide that friendly interaction, and watch your audience grow!
Blogs, a shortened version of “web log,” are typically personal and short, diary-like entries that touch on a specific topic. Perhaps you went to an event trade show and found out about a great new technique you are going to try in the next product you introduce. Or maybe you went to a seminar on whipping cream and want to share what you learned.
Like websites, there are templates, mostly free, available to make the blogging process simple—you sign up, create your blog, write your entries, and the template sets up an archive for you. Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger are a few more popular blog platforms. Some website template services, like Weebly, offer blogging as an option with your website.
You don’t have to be a bestselling writer to write your own blog. But if writing really isn’t even a distant strong suit for you, consider hiring a writer to help you with it. Create a draft in Word, email it to your writing professional, and he or she can make it zing—and probably edit the grammar and proofread it, also. It’s worth the small fee that an hour or two a week (or however often you do your blog) will cost. You pay an accountant to check your numbers, why not pay a writer to check that you sound just right to your target market?
Try to include both pictures and perhaps links to sites with further information in your blog. Again, use it to engage potential customers but don’t use it as a strong selling tool. This is your chance to be personal with existing and potential clients. Give them some good information, and even if they don’t become immediate customers, they may use you to cater their event or they may remember you kindly and tell their friends who are looking for a specialty food source to check out your blog.
Enter the Blogosphere
Blogs are essentially online journals or brief newsletters, sometimes with more than one author. You may find blogs useful for networking, brainstorming, and simply commiserating with other food business professionals. Check out The Nibble online specialty food magazine’s blog (http://blog.thenibble.com) for an example.
And like websites, no one will know you even have a blog unless you tell the world. Be sure to use phrases in your blog and mark keyword tags that help your blog appear when people search that word or phrase. For example, if you are writing about that whipped cream seminar, be sure to use the phrase “whipped cream” several times in the body of the blog or make sure to list the topics in the “tags” function.
You can link your blog to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages as well, so your friends and acquaintances on those sites will know when you’ve posted a new blog entry. It can appear with some initial teaser copy, enticing them to click on the link.
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Facebook itself has a “facebook for business” page at www.facebook.com/business that walks you through the steps for setting up a page for your business, including what is permissible and what is not.
Facebook started as a way to communicate with your network of friends. However, not only have people always used it to promote their businesses but Facebook itself has been offering ways to make the social media platform business-friendly. And friends “like” websites that they want to support. So definitely create a Facebook page for your business but use it sparingly for directly promoting your product.
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“Some retailers have been able to increase sales conversions 10 to 15 percent by tailoring their social media content based on customers’ previous purchases, according to McKinsey Research.”
—Harvard Business Review online “Your Company Should Be Helping Customers on Social” by Maher Masri, et al., 7/15/15
A HubSpot blog (http://blog.hubspot.com) puts it best: “As a business on Facebook, you want to compel not repel customers.” They show a great graphic that highlights things to do and not do. One key piece of advice is to follow the 80/20 rule—in this case, 80 percent of your posts should be social, and only 20 percent pertain to your business/products. Do respond to customer interactions within 24 hours. And, like with all social media, keep your posts short. Suggested frequency of posting is once to four times a week. This should go without saying, but do not write fake comments for your posts.
Postings to your Facebook wall might include some fun tidbits you learned about a new type of mustard or the region from which it comes, or some blooper packaging experiment you did.
Check out the pages of other food-related businesses and see how they are using Facebook to their advantage.
LinkedIn is thought of as the Facebook of the business world. The general advice is to make your LinkedIn page more formal than a Facebook page might be. This is where people might go to see your resume, client list, a “serious” picture of you (i.e., a formal headshot, not the picture of your cat sleeping across your head).
LinkedIn is almost definitely going to be the more likely place your business is exposed to the corporate world if, for instance, your products include something that could be used for corporate gifts. However, no one can see more than the most basic information about you without your approval of a “connection” with them.
A Twitter account for your business may be best used as an extension of a blog. You can send quick messages of up to 140 characters, a “tweet,” to your subscribers. “Found the greatest fair trade coffee to use in next batch of macaroons—check the Macaroon Mania website for details!” or “Stop by the store Wednesday evening six to eight for tastings of our latest chocolate bars paired with red wines from WineBar. 123 Front Street” might be messages that promote your service while also offering benefit to the reader.
Food is great for photo-focused media. The following are useful platforms for sharing images of your great products especially when they are being used in real-life ways and not just part of a photo shoot!
While there are loads of photo-sharing social media platforms from Flickr to Imgur to Tumblr and probably some being created as you read this, Pinterest seems to have landed as the most useful of them all, especially for things that are particularly visual and can be well captured in a close-up photo.
When you sign up with Pinterest, you can start a pin board themed by flavor (think “spicy” or “lemon”), food (yams, beef). Friends sign on to follow your pins. If you are looking for an idea (holiday whoopie pies, for example) you can search the topic on Pinterest and scroll through photos gathering ideas.
Self-defined as “a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with your friends and family,” Instagram is an image-driven version of Facebook (now owned by Facebook). Snap a picture and post it to your social network platforms. A key feature is that you can play with the appearance of the photo with filters. Instagram might be a good way to share images of your work or ideas that you find.
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Twitter—where “tweets” can only be 140 characters or fewer—is a more casual and personal media outlet like a blog and is referred to as a “microblog.” You can post an image with your tweet.
Snapchat is another image-driven social media platform. The basic idea is that you snap a picture, add a caption, and send it to a friend—and it disappears in a few seconds after they open it.
More social media outlets are coming down the pike every week. The important thing to keep in mind is to use the ones that work best for your business. Don’t let them work against you—like attaching a “hashtags” to an image but the hashtag is already taken so when someone searches it they come up with someone else’s images. Definitely don’t feel like you have to be involved in all of them. And especially don’t overwhelm yourself so that you are spending more time keeping up with social media tweets and posts than you are in developing new business! You’re in business to make and/or sell gourmet food, not to create social media posts.