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"