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Permalink Reply by Paul Yates on July 22, 2010 at 4:03pm

Facebook, Twitter, Yelp!, Urbanspoon, Foursquare. We use all these. Well, we are on Foursquare, but no one in our town uses it, so it does almost no good for us. Which brings me to my first point...make sure that people in your area use a social network service. Facebook is a great bet, and since starting our bakery's page in January, we now have over 2,200 fans. Most of these people are ex-residents of our town, or perhaps pass through regularly and stop to see us. But the locals, they actually only amount to perhaps 200-300. I should probably check the info on that. I even have my bakery photos on Facebook linked to our website, so that I don't have to upload them twice! Twitter, we have 20 followers. Tweeting hasn't happened yet in our town. But I see it coming...

Yelp! and Urbanspoon are great ways for people to be able to know you are there. There are promo opportunities on these sites. People from out of town will be able to find you using these sites.

Your first goal: Students. What does your shop offer them that no other shop can? Events? Music? Literary events? Sports night? Now, how can you promote what you can offer them? One shop I know offers a 40% discount toward a coffee beverage upon seeing your retweet of one of their promo tweets. Other shops have a Facebook fan special with a code word that was in the shop's recent post. The code word gets them some bargain or other. Late night hours? Tell the students!! Lots of places won't stay open late.

Second Goal: Government employees. Facebook is a great way to reach them. Have Government ID day, perhaps specific offices or departments, bring in their ID, get a discount. Perhaps do like the radio stations. Office with the most fans responding to a specific post in a given time slot gets a discounted delivery of coffee and cookies at 2 in the afternoon (which happens to be the most sleepy time of day)

Looking forward to hearing others' ideas!

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Permalink Reply by Parge73 on July 26, 2010 at 12:08pm

Thanks Paul! You definately turned me onto foursquare, I had never heard of it before this.

A nearby coffee shop closed down so we are concentrating our marketing right now on regaining their business. I will try to keep this updated about our social marketing if you are ever interested.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Yates on July 26, 2010 at 2:16pm

I would recommend reading mashable.com , which focuses on social media trends. Perhaps a search of their archives will give you some ideas.

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Permalink Reply by Jason Dominy on July 26, 2010 at 6:50pm

I concur with Paul on checking out Mashable. Great social media content and advice on how to use it.

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Permalink Reply by Jennifer Vaaler on March 21, 2011 at 10:49am

Paul offers some great tips.

Facebook is defanitly the main platform to at least start with. You can get a lot of customer engagement on there, especially since a lot more people are on there than Twitter.

Whatever platforms you use, always remember that pushing a sell at your customer is the last thing you should do. I don't like to think of Social Media as marketing...it's all about building relationships. It's a small down online.

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