Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/105573
BUSINESS BASICS continued from page 28 each other (often to the point of awkwardness), so it's vital to treat social-media channels the same way you might treat a face-to-face interaction. Be honest and be friendly. SOCIAL STAFF For most users, social media is a tool to stay in touch with people and to share what's going on in their lives. For the shop it's a marketing tool, but because it integrates with the casual conversational nature of social media, it's shouldn't feel like advertising. That means that even if a sale is being announced on Facebook, it shouldn't just state the day and time of the sale. It needs to talk about the sale, why it's exciting for the cusTHERE'S AN APP FOR THAT: A Gypsy Donut regular checks in using Perka. tomer and invite them to come in. The message can't be out of place in the context of the other useful to most: things that customers are reading on their feeds. FACEBOOK. We use Facebook for all the daily messaging for our Social-media programs are marketing in nature—you're shop, especially for things that are too small in scope to reach our using these platforms to put a human face on your brick-and- blog. (We don't need to blog about each day's doughnut flavor, for mortar business, giving it a sense of life. This is the beauty of example.) Even things that are blog-worthy automatically post to social media: A store has the ability to act Facebook after being published. and interact with its customers as if the Facebook has a few key advantages (aside two sides are friends. That means that from near universal adoption), including HOOKING THEM the messages posted on social-media outthe ability to target advertisements to TOGETHER lets need to be regular, well crafted and potential customers based on geographic With so many different socialinteresting, and they also need to reveal regions and/or interests, as well as the abilmedia outlets available, it's often something about the shop. The best camity to create offers and promote posts. difficult to keep them all updated, paigns are ones in which the shop reveals Once a company's page reaches 400 even if your shop is using just a a bit about the struggles and benefits of "likes" (this number might change in the few of them. Luckily, most of them being in business. future), the brand becomes able to promote connect and allow posts from one It's crucial then to have a person in individual posts and to create offers. This tool to automatically show up on charge of checking all of the social-media is very powerful, as it gives a shop a way other sites. There are too many tools, using them daily and not only postto spread the word about special deals and steps to list the processes to coning interesting tidbits but also responding events with friends of the people who are nect each site here, but they're to comments and questions. The whole idea fans of the page. all easy to do and can be found if of an interaction with customers is blown A good way to leverage this is to run you Google a phrase like "connect if they ask a question and no one responds. a standard ad (targeted toward local Facebook with Twitter." residents) until the "like" count gets to 400, and then switch to primarily promoting THE PLAYERS individual posts. This is a great way to For the coffee shop, there are a few social-media outlets that get the word out on special deals and events without paying to make up a "must" list of tools and a few that might fit into the randomly catch a person who has no interest in your store. "maybe" category. Not every social-media platform is useful to There are other ways to drive customers to Facebook. In our a shop; here's an overview of the social-media tools that are shop we use Perka as a loyalty program, and it allows us to create 30 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com