3 Steps To BOOM Your Small Business With Social Media Marketing

The Billings Park Cafe Story

Billings Park Cafe Facebook

I recently decided to offer some social media help to my fiancé’s family, well my family with their local business. They have a small café that has a local neighborhood tradition in Superior, WI. They bought and reopened the cafe just a little over two years ago. Sine then they have had success but yet still had some areas of opportunity for marketing primarily through social media. Once I became admin the fun began. These steps can be used for any small business to build a social media community. 

Here are the steps to Billings Park Cafe social media boom! 

Step 1 – Assess the Current Page

Is there a theme? Can we improve the cover photo (banner) and profile picture? Are the pictures in albums? Do they have descriptions? Look at the page settings, are they set right for the page you’re running? Is there an address/email/info? The more details about your business the better as many people use social media to learn about businesses. For example in the past one might call a business to see when they close, in todays world many will go on Facebook and check your page.  

            Billings Park Cafe – The first thing I did was design a cover photo,

Cover photo - focused on family tradition

as they did not have one. I also updated their profile picture
to one that would resemble the family local tradition. Another thing we did right away is change the settings so people’s messages were private and not on page. This moved the reviews section up on the page in the area where messages had been previously seen. Now with the messages private they can recover customers without a bad image on their site, which can be huge for a service business like the cafe.

New profile picture

Step 2  – Evaluate the Insights 

What are they doing well? What post are working? What is not?Insights can give you an understanding of your page's following. Demographic information like gender and age can give you a good image of your target consumer online. You can develop online campaigns with this information. 

            BillingsParkCafe – With them I realized that nearly 40% of their online followers are women ages 25-44. Now to be clear this is not a target market for the business necessarily, but it does offer areas of insight to who you will be engaging content for later. In their case the demographics appear to in the mother range which is perfect for the family appeal of the café. This allows them to evaluate their options for families online as well as perhaps on the menu. Kids menu options may be added and a campaign may be run online directed at mothers or for kid’s specials. This is an opportunity to engage in the future. 

Step 3 – Develop Content to Engage Your Community 

After you have made the page more professional and evaluated the past performance of the page, now you can look at how you can boost the engagement. Marty Weintraub, CEO of Aimclear recently wrote in his blog, “You can bullshit reach, but not engagement” and this has rung in my head since reading it. The reach is somewhat easy to get, and sometimes is not a great measure to look at. A better statistic is engagement. Engagement is not just people viewing your post but actually taking the time to engage with the post in the form of a click, like, comment, and/or share. The user has interacted with the page and after all that is the purpose right? It is to get the user involved right? So how do we do this? There are many ways to do this and some are easy with paid promotions. But a good free way is to post in a form of a question. People who read it feel inclined to respond. 

            Billings Park Cafe – In the case of the café, I noticed they had pictures of menus on their site. Which was good, but they were pictures of menus, not a photo scan. This was an opportunity to develop a fun engaging post. I photo scanned the menus, and created an album. I asked a question and left a _______ at the end.

This went on longer than shown here. Also notice the 5 Star review! 

Also instead of scanning the last page of the menu, which had dinners, I created a Weekend Dinners ad. I felt this was important to separate off the regular menu because it could draw more attention to a special. They are only open for dinners two nights a week. This ad was needed as it really featured a time that they are trying to boost some more traffic.

This share is awesome and we thanked Barb immediately for her support.

In just a few days the Billings Park Cafe went from 408 to 591 likes. The reach is up as well even nearly doubling the previous top reach. None of these stats are more important than the engagement though, which is up 447%!

Oh and did I mentioned this was all FREE!

The engagement here shows no likes comments, or shares. This must be an error as this was not the case as previously seen above and also on this same photo. Also with page likes and reach notice the spike in action or "BOOM"

Lessons From a Social Media Intern

I have started my 2^nd internship in social media. It is important to understand that my lessons might be very different than others experiences. This is probably because while others went and searched out firms to do an internship with I wanted to work with actual infant accounts. Something that I could gain experience from the growth and what works and what does not. I specifically sought out internships where I would be the main person responsible not only for running the social media platforms but also designing future social media plans for the company.

My first internship was with my University. I worked with the Student Life department. I was responsible for the Facebook and Twitter ads. Yes, ads, the school had an approach of wanting to use the sites to push promotions. They actually labeled me the social media promotions intern. I did not know it at the time, but this was a lesson I would later realize was an example of what not to do. Granted promotions here and there are fine, but to be the main function of the social media the site is just plain ludicrous. Part of this was my own fault, as I did not consciously know at the time that we should develop quality content. I knew that there was something wrong with the way we had been doing it. But I wanted to do what my bosses had asked for. At the time I had not had social media marketing in school.

However I used my common sense and knew that we needed a way for people to view us as not just a sales enterprise and actually get them to engage on our site. I ended up creating a contest that reached over 10,000 people; this was a major success for a site that when I had taken it over had 30 followers.

My 2^nd internship I have just started. It is with the Edina Lakers a Junior Hockey team that is part of the Minnesota Junior Hockey League (MNJHL). Again with them, they are still new in diffusing the elements of social meida. While they have a decent following and have already established several platforms they have not developed the quality content that their fans are seeking out from their pages. This is my goal with them, develop a consistent user experience across all their platforms and engage with the people who have already been engaged to help penetrate more of the team’s fan market.

Keys to Success Learned So Far

1.    Patience – When working with clients, or employers of smaller businesses patience can be key. Most of the time these companies are lagging on their pages for a reason. They may not understand fully what social media can do for them. Other times they may have been intimidated as social media can seem very complex to someone who has not yet taken the dive. It may take a bit of time for them to get up to speed with everything you may be purposing.

2.    Content – It is one thing to have engagement your community. It is another to actually keep them engaged. People have tons of interest especially in today’s digital era. Capturing that attention takes effort and quality content that will give them a reason to tune in.

3.    Homework/Planning – One must do their homework in all formats. What is your client doing thus far? What are their close competitors doing? Can they differentiate? What is the target market? Have they reached their target? Tons of questions need to be answered. Any marketer knows these questions as they seemingly come second nature to us. But the 2^nd part is something that many forget. Planning is a major aspect of social media. One cannot just post things randomly when the ideas strike. Have a plan in mind, what are you trying to accomplish? Develop steps to take to accomplish that goal. Execute the steps in a timely matter that best reaches your market. Finally evaluate the effectiveness of the plan you had. Can you do better? My guess is yes, as everyone can do better.

There are tons of lessons from social media and this blog will be dedicated to my experience both in the classroom, internships, and on my own as I read just about everything I can manage.

On the next post I plan to debunk the 7 myths of social media!