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Internal and External Ways to Leverage Social Media

By Lizz McCrindle

NSGA Communications and Social Media Manager

There are many marketing channels available to your small business. However, very few afford you the ability to inform, motivate, engage and connect with your target audience quite like social media. Now more than ever, consumers are making informed decisions about where they choose to spend their money. Most consumers place an added value on shopping with brands they identify with and are socially involved and active in the community. Leveraging social media to market your small business and keep your customers informed and engaged is essential and relatively easy to do.

Share Your Passion

What better way to connect with your existing and prospective customers than to explain the purpose and passion behind your business? Taking the opportunity to explain the origins of your business, or “why you do what you do,” allows you to share your product/industry knowledge and expertise while building credibility and forging a dependable and trustworthy reputation within your target audience.

Turn A Contest into An Engagement Opportunity

Who doesn’t like free stuff? Create a marketing campaign encouraging your customers to engage with your brand on social media by sharing photos/videos of their in-store experience or purchase. Is there anything unique about your in-store space? Create a “selfie-area” in your store and use signage to request that customers tag your business in their post. At the end of the month, choose one of the participants who tagged your business at random to win a prize (and of course make a post recognizing each month’s winner).

Share Customer Testimonials

Providing excellent customer service is a skill that all shoppers appreciate! In addition to recognizing your staff internally for going above and beyond, try incentivizing your customers to share their positive experience with your business online. Customer reviews and testimonials are worth their weight in gold because essentially you have an existing customer telling a prospective customer why they should do business with you. Testimonials add credibility to your marketing campaigns by allowing someone else to speak to your audience on their experience with your business.

Behind-the-Scenes

Take the customer behind-the-scenes by sharing photos/video of your new store remodel, a team member interacting with a customer on the sales floor, the next company event, big product rollout or team promotion. This type of access humanizes your brand and helps your audience view you and your team as people and not just simply a business.

Make an Appreciation Post

Take a moment to thank the customers, vendors and employees who contribute to the success of your business. Social media is a great tool to show gratification and give recognition to those who support you. In addition to being polite, it also affords you the opportunity to tag those individuals and/or businesses on social media. By tagging and engaging with them in your post, you have the ability to reach their followers, in turn increasing the number of post impressions and possible new customers for your business.

One Last Tip

It’s important to use photos as often as possible when posting on social media. When used properly, images can expand the reach of the post and add value to the written content that accompanies the image. The photos should be related directly to the post and add value to the story the post is attempting to convey.