A Retailers guide to Organic Social Posting

What should I post on social media?

This is the recurring question asked time and time again to our digital marketing team. Your social media platform should represent your business both professionally and personally. Many businesses forget the “social” part of social media and constantly advertise products.

When promoting your business, focus on the solution you provide, not the products you sell. It’s essential to add value to your customers and build on your brand image. Never underestimate the fact that your most important asset (and downfall) on social media, is visual content.  Be sure the images you upload reflect the image you want to portray for your business. Video is highly engaging and the recognised way forward. 

A guide as to what to post

Are you owl 1, 2 or 3? Owl 1 eyes completely shut oblivious to the world of social media, Owl 2 Half an idea but not sure what or where to post? Or are you owl number 3? Eyes firmly on the prize?

Rule of thirds from Hootsuite

• ⅓ of your social content promotes your business, this includes product promotion & special offers.
• ⅓ of your social content should share ideas, pictures and stories from like-minded and similar businesses, this is content about your business but not product related.
• ⅓ of your social content should be based on personal interactions within or indeed outside of your business and build your personal brand.

Even with these guidelines keep in mind that you should add to the ‘Social’ aspect of the post. Instead of taking a screengrab of the shoe on your website,  how about a staff member puts them on their feet, goes outside and take a quick boomerang video of the product? This approach is guaranteed to gain more interest than another picture of a still motionless product and takes minimal time, effort and zero money.

What you need to remember when trying to figure out what to post is that…… People are nosey!! Even a simple picture of a delivery in your stockroom will gain traction, you would be surprised the majority people who have never worked in retail and  really do think its Narnia out there! A hidden world of all the best products that we are keeping all for ourselves. No, we promise we aren’t hiding all the stock on you and yes, we promise if we had what you’re looking for we would most definitely sell it to you! Make your customer feel special by showing them sneak peaks into your business and as an added bonus this will build the personal side of your business.

Ideas & where to find them

Another extremely common question is what content do I post? I know how to, but I can never think of anything to post.

A very simple way around this is to get organised, get yourself a content calendar! Start it off with adding all the national holidays this can feed fodder for numerous posts during the year. Next, add your colleague’s birthdays. Now you can just do a generic Happy Birthday post but if you’re really organised, you’ll get regular cake’s out of it too!

This ties nicely into my next point -take your camera/phone out, no screen grabs or borrowing other people’s images/content use your camera and get photos of the people behind the scenes. I have seen time and time again that photos with actual people in them gain higher level of traction then those without.

For an added level of timeliness, look through daily trends and hashtag holidays for 2019 days here: Hashtag Holiday Calendar. This can be so much fun to do & to make a personal twist on it, see our own post for #LoveYourPetDay here

And on the note of #hashtags if you want to calculate the popularity of a hash tag you can use hashtagify.me

Bank of memes

This is a term I like to use for your stash of funny content you find when browsing your social media channels, when you see it, save it and bank it for when you need good content to post. Trying to find/trying to think of content on the fly can be very hard and will make the job of social media posting far harder than it should be! Posting funny, relatable content that’s relevant to your business or brand can encourage fans to tag their friends – this helps to spread brand awareness without feeling overly promotional. Also, by a person interacting with your post they are more likely to be shown your posts in the future.

When to post

Finally, the all-important decision to me made at the end of all this when will I post it?

Well to be honest If I knew this, I wouldn’t be writing this blog! The best logical way to keep track of your previous posts and engagements and schedule content for the optimal time for your audience specifically, but if time is short use your Facebook page insights to see when your followers are online as shown below: