Snaptastic Blog

If we had a penny for every time we heard that you don’t have enough hours in the day to market your business online, well, we’d have a lot of pennies! And who wants pennies when you can have dollars? Social media and email marketing has proven to increase brand awareness, provoke word of mouth, and generate store traffic  as long as you invest enough time and resources.

You’re reading our blog so you obviously have the resources, now all you need is the time. We’re going to give you some simple steps to knock out your social media marketing in 30 minutes every morning. Who needs Starbucks when you can have social media coffee?

Respond

Check each of your business’s active social mediums and respond quickly, personally, and appropriately. Acknowledge any dissatisfaction by apologizing for the negative experience and inviting the customer back to your business with a special offer and promise of exceptional service the second time around. Thank customers for their feedback and ask to share their positive experiences with the rest of your community. If a customer mentions a great customer service experience on Twitter, thank them and ask if you can quote their tweet on Facebook. Now is the time to engage in conversation. Be sure to acknowledge all forms of communication by responding to all retweets, mentions, favorites, +1s, comments, and messages. The worst you can do is ignore your customers online. It is called social media for a reason, right?

Create

Now comes the most important part of your morning. Take this time to be as creative as possible. Can’t even draw a stick figure? No worries. Check out some of these guys for retail inspiration. Inspired now? Good, let’s begin. Take a few photos of a seasonal display, employees, new product, a local event, a customer with their new purchase, and even your cat! If you don’t want to take the time to “snap” some photos (no pun intended) you can pull images from Google images, a stock photo library, or Pinterest. Images create the most meaningful conversation in the social media universe- they’re like the sugar to your social media coffee.

Embrace national, seasonal, and even goofy holidays. These are great ideas to provoke community buzz and can easily fall into your posting schedule. If it’s National Pajama Day, talk about it online by posting a picture of your employees at work in their pajamas. You can even give customers a percentage off their purchase if they come to your store in their PJs.

If you have any store related information such as sales, new arrivals, and or events, now’s the time to create the promotional messaging. Be sure to follow our 70/20/10 rule so that you don’t come off too “salesy” to your customers.

Write a blog. Or at least begin one. Tell your customers why you’re passionate about certain vendors you carry, give some home décor advice, recap a successful store event, and/or tell the history of your store. A blog can be very time consuming but a few quick paragraphs may be the key to engaging your audience even further.

Keep all this content in a spreadsheet, word document, or old fashioned notepad so that you always have a stream of content to share across all media.

Schedule

Schedule all of your daily social media efforts so you can focus on additional business related tasks. You can use SnapRetail to schedule the time and date of your tweets and posts while staying organized with our visual marketing calendar. We suggest scheduling 1-3 Facebook posts and 3-6 tweets per day. You can even drag and drop our ideas to your calendar to be sent later so you don’t have to create your own content. If you finished up a blog during a time of the day when customers aren’t online be sure to schedule it to publish early in the morning, around lunch time, or late at night. Scheduling your daily marketing is one of the biggest social media time savers.

Test

Take our suggestions and find what works best for your business. Some marketers need to allot different amounts of time for different tasks. It depends what works best for your business. Not everyone takes cream and sugar in their social media coffee.

* Image courtesy of www.perpetualkid.com