Get social

MEDIA SOCIAL

It pays to get social Unleashing

the power of social

Social media has never been more important for Londis retailers and to help you take those important fi rst steps into the digital world Londis has created a beginner’s guide on the subject. We share a few tips from the guide below.

WHAT TO INCLUDE ON YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE

l A picture or video of your store

– or something branded.

l Your logo – ideally as it appears

above your store.

l Your address details.

TO CREATE A PAGE:

l Go to facebook.com/pages/

create to get started.

l Click to choose a page category

(choose local business or place).

l Select a more specific category

from the dropdown menu and fill out the required information (choose supermarket/ convenience store).

l Click ‘Get Started’ and follow

the on-screen instructions.

Social and digital media have long been two of the most effective means of communicating with your existing shoppers, as well as grabbing the attention of new potential shoppers in your locality. If anything, the importance of these channels has grown over the last 18 months so it’s the perfect time to embrace the opportunities that social and digital offers to retailers.

Social media is easy to access, is widely used by the general public and, in its simplest forms, is completely free. Many Londis retailers have already enjoyed great success with their social and digital media presence, boosting footfall and basket spend while increasing awareness of their stores and their value to the communities they serve.

One multi-award-winning business that very quickly understood the huge power of social media is Londis Solo Convenience in Baillieston, just outside Glasgow. With almost 5,000 followers on Facebook, the family business views social media as “mission critical” and devotes a lot of time and effort to it.

Store owner Nathalie Lightfoot comments: “We’ve been very active social media for a long time. It’s an important tool for us to talk to our shoppers – and potential shoppers – and we see it as critical to how we run the store and the business.

“Social media is just so versatile and powerful, and it can be entirely free. We post lots of times every day and we try to produce our content in a way that replicates how we communicate with our shoppers in real life. That means a little bit of fun but always professional and polite. That’s how we treat shoppers in-store so that’s how we treat them in social media too.”

Retailers who wish to get involved with social media should consider the following: l You need to post regularly to keep the shopper engaged. l Keeping a constant stream of interesting material like photos, videos, recipes etc. is difficult, and can be time consuming.

Tracking just how successful social media is in terms of driving footfall, sales and profits is, says Nathalie, quite difficult – but she knows that it definitely works: “It’s hard to get precise and to put an ROI on the effort you put into social media, but we know for sure that it delivers big commercial benefits. It brings new shoppers to our door, it helps generate interest in exciting new products, it gets more people to use our home delivery services. It does all these things and keeps awareness levels of our store really high in our local area and beyond. It just works.”

If you are not already using social or digital media to drive business in your store, then now is the right time to start.

However, making that first foray into the digital world can be daunting for the inexperienced, so Londis News is here to give you some highlights from the Londis guide to social media, which you can request from your RDM. Just follow these key pointers to start giving your store an effective digital and social media presence.

GET GOOGLING An important first step is to make sure that your store shows up on Google searches and maps. Google is one of the most important channels your business should be appearing on – it has over two billion monthly users and 3.8 million searches take place every minute!

To ensure useful information about your business appears alongside any local area search, there are a couple of simple steps to take with Google.

If your business already shows up as a location on Google Maps, you simply need to “claim” it. In the panel containing the address/ hours/phone, click on the link saying ‘Own this Business?’ and continue from there. Remember to input information useful to a potential shopper: business name, opening hours, and phone number. If possible, add pictures too – potential shoppers will want to see photos of your business, so the better the pictures and the more of them, the more it will attract the shopper. If your business is a new build, you will need to register it with Google. In this case, there is a step-bystep guide they will take you through.

MAKE NEW FRIENDS Setting up a social media presence is easy to do, but it is important to remember that it is an ongoing commitment, not just a one-off. Platforms such as Facebook are interactive, and users are both hungry for new information and likely to make comments of their own on your page, so it is very important to keep posting new content and to monitor the activity on the page itself.

Top Tips

l The worst thing you can do is set up a Facebook page that you don’t maintain.

l Be patient, as you may not attract much attention to start with unless you are investing money in advertising.

l By having a social media presence, you are potentially opening up a channel for customer complaints that should be monitored frequently and with care.

l Everything you post, and almost every interaction you have with your shoppers, will be in the public eye.