I’m back after a long hiatus and a couple life changing
events! Sorry that I’ve been gone for so long. I looked on here the other day
and it said I hadn’t posted in a month. I will admit I felt guilty when I saw
that. I’m always telling people to blog as much as possible, and I had been
silent for almost a month, but trust me if you had to deal with the things I’ve
went through this month I think you’d understand. Anyways, enough of that let’s
talk shop.
This past month I have spent over 75% of my days on the
road. I have been to just over ten garden centers and to about five small
farms. Everywhere I would say that 90% of the places that I’ve been to were
active on social media. Were they utilizing it to the best of their
capabilities? Most of the time the answer was no, but they were still believers
in this new channel. In past blogs I’ve talked about how to get started on
social media, how to set up accounts, even a little bit on how to engage the
new consumer in and outside of social media. Today I want to talk about finding
your customers and potential customers with social media. Today we’re talking
about generating your own leads.
Being active in reaching out to your potential customers can
help you show that your business cares about the community. Having a great deal
of followers from around the globe can be great and you can learn a lot from
people all over the place, but if you’re a local business and all of your
followers are from over 100 miles away you aren’t reaping all of the benefits
of social media. The key to local success is to think local. Put yourselves in
the shoes of your customer.
Let’s start with Facebook for example. The first thing to
know is that your business is not the only business in your town that is on
Facebook. Hopefully by now you know where your target customer shops. Maybe
they shop at a local hardware store, maybe they go to a bakery up the street.
The point is they go to other businesses. They shop at other businesses that
have Facebook pages. Search these stores. Like them, connect with them. Maybe
you work out a deal with the bakery. Buying a birthday cake gets you a dollar
off of their purchase at your location. It’s all about being connected locally.
Offer an exchange post on your pages where if you share something of another
local business they will share content of yours. Also many chambers of commerce
have Facebook accounts today. Connect with them to increase your visibility.
If you have a Twitter account and are looking to connect
locally, it’s even easier. Sure you can still follow local businesses and try
to connect with them and work on cross promotion, but Twitter is an even
sweeter deal than that. Twitter gives you access to all of the followers of any
given user. Therefore if there is a famous business in your area that is
followed by everyone in town. You can then go and follow all of the followers
of that business (www.tweepi.com makes this
task extremely easy). It puts your name in front of people. Maybe before they
didn’t know where your business was or maybe they simply didn’t know you had a
Twitter account. Either way you’re advertising directly to your target
customers. Most of them will probably
follow you back. For the ones that don’t you just unfollow (if you’re concerned
about ratios). It’s simple it’s effective and it gets those local customers
thinking about your local garden center or farm.
Another way to tap into that local scene on Twitter is to
use hashtags associated with your region or area. If there is a summer festival
in your area that’s using a hashtag find a way to tap into it. Find a way to
say something relevant that would be viewed in a positive light if someone
stumbled across it in a hashtag stream. Some cities even have hashtags that are
populated enough to draw attention.
Again the biggest lesson in this post is that if you make
your money locally, it’s time to find a way to tap into the local social media.
The channel is great for making worldwide friends, but sometimes it’s best suited
for making friends right outside of your back door.
Contact me for any reason here:
