Tag Archives: Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing – Filling Your Restaurant

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Marketing a restaurant on social media requires special considerations to effectively showcase the dining experience, engage with food enthusiasts, and drive foot traffic or online orders.  For restaurants in particular, we highlight some of the key areas of marketing that are key for success.

  • Visual Content (or “image”) is Everything:  Restaurants should focus on high-quality, mouthwatering visuals of their dishes. Invest in professional food photography to make your menu items look irresistible.  Instagram is particularly well-suited for showcasing food and beverages.
  • Regular Menu Updates:  Use social media to announce and promote new menu items, seasonal specials, and limited-time offers.  Creating anticipation for new dishes can generate interest and curiosity, and bring in customers.
  • User-Generated Content:  Encourage diners to share photos of their meals on social media with a branded hashtag.  Repost user-generated content on your restaurant’s profile to build authenticity and social proof.
  • Live Videos and Stories:  usse live streaming and Stories on platforms like Instagram and Facebook to give followers a behind-the-scenes look at your kitchen, chef, and food preparation process.  Live videos create a sense of connection with your audience.
  • Engage with Foodies and Influencers:  Partner with local food influencers or bloggers to review your restaurant or collaborate on content. Their reviews and recommendations can carry a lot of weight with food enthusiasts.  Emphasize unique dishes.
  • Promote Events and Special Occasions:  Highlight special events, such as wine tastings, themed nights, or holiday promotions, to attract a diverse audience and create a sense of community.
  • Interactive Content:  Run polls, quizzes, and contests related to food preferences, restaurant trivia, or menu choices. This type of interactive content can boost engagement and keep your audience involved.
  • Local SEO and Geotagging:  Optimize your social media profiles for local search by including location-specific keywords, hours of operation, and contact information. Use geotags when posting to help potential customers find your restaurant easily.
  • Customer Reviews and Feedback:  Monitor and respond to customer reviews and comments promptly and professionally. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews, and address negative feedback diplomatically.  A polite acknowledgment with resolve goes a long way to assuring future customers that the situation was one-off.  It also gives you control – end the exchange on a positive note, and your potential customers also get a good positive feeling inside. 
  • Loyalty Programs and Discounts:  Use social media to promote loyalty programs, discounts, and special offers. Create exclusive deals for your social media followers to encourage repeat visits.
  • Highlight the Community:  Engage with the local community by participating in or sponsoring events, charity initiatives, or collaborations with nearby businesses. Sharing your community involvement fosters goodwill.
  • Storytelling:  Share the story behind your restaurant, including its history, chef’s background, and the inspiration behind your cuisine. This personal touch can create a stronger emotional connection with your audience.
  • Online Ordering and Reservations:  If your restaurant offers online ordering or reservations, promote these services prominently on your social media profiles. Include direct links.

Marketing a restaurant on social media requires a mix of creativity, engagement, and strategic thinking. By understanding the unique considerations mentioned above, you can create a compelling online presence that attracts diners and builds a loyal customer base.

5 Easy Steps to Using Surveys to Understand your Audience (Plus 2 Difficult Steps)

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Surveys are a powerful tool for gaining direct insights into what your audience wants, needs, and values.  

This article describes how you can effectively use surveys to understand your audience’s preferences and tailor your offerings.

Step 1 – Define Your Goals:  Every survey question will be oriented around the objective of what you are trying to discover.  Starting the out the process, write down in once sentence what you want to learn from the survey.  Are you seeking feedback on a specific product, service, content, or overall brand perception?

Step 2 – Choose a Survey Platform:  Use a reputable survey platform such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Typeform, or Qualtrics to create and distribute your survey.

Step 3 – Choose a Survey Type:  Common types include multiple-choice, open-ended questions, rating scales, and Likert scales (opinions on a spectrum of 5 points).  Exploratory surveys, where you are looking for depth of insight, would use more open-ended (short answer or long paragraphs) questions, and where your audience may be small.  Statistical sampling can be done with a large population of responses, but will require questions to be written with precision, and answer choices which cover the universe of possibilities in order for the results to provide meaning.   

Step 4 – Craft Clear and Concise Questions:  Create questions that are easy to understand and avoid ambiguity. Use simple language and avoid leading questions.

How to write good questions for an online survey

Question Development Guidelines: 

  • Focus on Relevant Topics:  Keep your survey focused on topics that are directly relevant to your audience and your goals. Avoid asking unrelated or unnecessary questions. 
  • Use a Mix of Question Types:  Include a variety of question types to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. This can provide a more comprehensive understanding.
  • Keep Surveys Short:  Respect your audience’s time by keeping surveys concise. Long surveys can lead to survey fatigue and incomplete responses.
  • Ask the Right Questions: The quality of your survey data depends on the quality of the questions you ask. Craft your questions carefully to gather actionable insights that can help you better understand your audience and tailor your offerings to meet their needs and preferences.

Step 5 – Test Your Survey and Initiate:  Test the survey on a small group to identify any issues with question clarity, formatting, or technical glitches.  After making adjustments based on testing, you may initiate your survey and watch the results roll in.

Difficult Step 1 – Promote Your Survey:  Share your survey through various channels, including email, social media, your website, and relevant online communities.  Getting responsiveness on your survey invitation may be a challenge, but underscoring a greater good or specific benefit to your customer will increase responsiveness. 

  • Convey a greater purpose to your audience.  The messaging behind the survey will be key to encouraging participation.  From an audience perspective, surveys can be quite a hassle.  They always take more time than advertised, and the longer the survey, the more nonsensical the questions become.  Who wants to waste their time with a set of meaningless questions?  The user should feel that by taking the survey, they are a part of something greater, and contributing to the good of society.  That kind of messaging gives motivation and meaning to the user in exchange for the 5 (or 10) minutes they will take out of their day to finish the question list.
  • Offer Incentives such as discounts, freebies, or entry into a giveaway to encourage participation.  The key question here to answer is, “what benefit is there to the customer for taking the survey?”
  • Use Engaging Survey Titles:  Craft a compelling and concise survey title that captures attention and conveys the importance of participating.
  • Personalize Invitations:  Personalize survey invitations with the recipient’s name and relevant details. Personalization can increase response rates.
  • Maximize Social Media:  Share the survey link on your social media platforms, and encourage your followers to share it with their networks. Use paid social media advertising for wider reach.
  • Engage Online Communities:  Share your survey in online communities, forums, and groups that are relevant to your target audience. Ensure you’re following community guidelines.
  • Collaborate with Influencers:  Partner with influencers or individuals with a strong online presence who can help promote your survey to their followers.
  • Use Visuals:  Eye-catching visuals or graphics can help to highlight key aspects of the survey and make your promotion more appealing.
  • Highlight Previous Survey Insights:  If you’ve conducted surveys before, share insights or improvements you’ve made based on participant feedback.
  • Simplify the Survey Process:  Ensure that the survey is easy to access, navigate, and complete. A user-friendly experience can reduce drop-offs.
  • Ask for Referrals:  Encourage survey participants to refer the survey to their contacts.
  • Transparent Data Use:  Assure participants that their data will be used responsibly and confidentially, addressing potential privacy concerns.
  • Thank Participants:  Express gratitude to participants for taking the time to complete the survey. A thank-you message can leave a positive impression.

Difficult Step 2 – Extract Actionable Meaning:  Analyzing the results is easy.  Once you’ve collected responses, analyze the data to identify trends, patterns, and insights.  Look at both quantitative data (numbers) and qualitative data (comments).  Knowing what to do about what you see is the hard part. 

  • Segment Your Audience:  If you have a diverse audience, consider segmenting your survey to tailor questions to specific groups.  What are the common preferences, pain points, or suggestions from your audience?
  • Adjust Your Strategy:  Use the insights gained from the survey to inform your content, product development, marketing strategies, and customer service efforts.  Ask the following questions: Does the survey indicate any surprises?  Is there something new you learned about your audience that you didn’t expect to see? Specifically what about the marketing strategy is validated through the survey?
  • Set up for a future survey:  Test the same or similar survey format in the future to determine if your changes had an impact. 
  • Know your audience: What kind of person has taken the survey?  Inversely, who did not take the survey, and what does this mean to the results?

Leverage survey results to gain audience insights

Surveying your audience is just one approach to learning.  One-on-one engagement, responding to comments, and researching publicly available information about your line of business will help to bring greater insights and depth of understanding to your survey analysis.

Advanced Account Management – A/B Testing

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A/B testing, also known as split testing, informs the social media marketer which advertisement or promotion text is more effective.  A/B testing involves comparing two versions of a social media post to determine which one does a better job in achieving an objective, which can be higher audience engagement, reach, click-through rates (CTR), conversions or any other promotional success metric.

Before addressing the step-by-step approach to A/B testing, knowing what to get out of it will enable thinking backwards from the end goal, to ensure that you get the most out of the testing process.  Are you testing for higher engagement, conversions, or another metric?  For a starting point, we will focus on CTR.

A/B testing enables greater social media impact

Why is A/B testing important for a social media marketer?  A/B testing enables data-driven decisioning over promotional effectiveness, and aims to provide a clear pathway forward to achieve better results.  It enables content creators to determine which types of content (e.g., images, videos, text) resonate best with their audiences, and by testing different variations of content, key drivers for higher engagement, click-through rates, and conversions can be better understood. 

This understanding comes from obtaining insights about your audience’s preferences and behavior.  You can test different messaging or creative approaches to see what appeals most to your target demographic, helping you refine your content strategy.  For paid social media advertising in particular, A/B testing is crucial to refining ad copy, images, targeting options, and ad formats, to ensure maximum financial return on the promotional budget.

Beyond just the financial results, A/B testing can help to optimize the user experience by testing different layouts, navigation options, or call-to-action buttons, and in this way can lead to higher user engagement and conversion rates.  Most importantly, by testing variations of landing pages or lead generation forms linked from social media, you can optimize lead generation and ultimately improve revenue from online offers. 

A/B testing is not just about format.  Timing and scheduling can also be tested, to determine the optimal times and days to post content.  This ensures that your posts reach your audience when they are most active and likely to engage.

A/B testing is an iterative process, enabling a virtuous cycle of continuous learning on the part of the social media promoter, and provides an empirical basis through which to refine social media content and promotional strategies.  Slight improvements over time can generate meaningful differences over the long run, which will give you and your business a competitive social media landscape.  Through this process, you will discover innovative approaches that differentiate your brand and messaging from others in your industry.

The steps to conducting an A/B test

  1. Choose a Variable to Test:  Decide on the element you want to test. This could be the headline, image, call-to-action (CTA), posting time, caption, or any other aspect of the post.
  2. Create Variations:  Create two versions of the social media post, keeping everything the same except for the variable you’re testing. For example, if you’re testing the headline, use the same image, caption, and CTA in both versions.
  3. Determine Your Sample Size:  Decide how many users or followers you want to include in the test.  Ideally, it should be a statistically significant sample size to ensure accurate results.  Statistical sampling is a topic for another day, but if your audience size is small, then aim to divide the samples evenly.  Keep the variations limited and focused – but with significant differences to test – so that the outcome can be clearly understood.  If the sampling is small, then keep in mind that the results, due to random factors over which you have no control, may show a small enough difference that you cannot fully determine which version is better. 
  4. Randomize the Audience:  Split your sample audience randomly into two groups.  The groups should be similar in terms of demographics and other relevant factors.
  5. Schedule the Posts:  Schedule the two versions of the posts to go live at the same time. This minimizes the impact of external factors like time of day (unless you are testing for differences in posting times, in which case your promotional text would be the same, and the only variable difference is in the timing). 
  6. Monitor Engagement:  Track the engagement metrics for both versions of the post. This could include likes, comments, shares, clicks, conversions, or any other relevant metrics. 
  7. Analyze the Results:  After the posts have been live for a sufficient amount of time, analyze the results. Compare the performance of the two versions to see which one achieved your desired outcome. 

Improving insights from A/B testing

While the steps to conducting an A/B test are straightforward, the art is in the application of Insights and in identifying the winning elements of your test to improve engagement and results.  To enable better insights and to accurately attribute the results to a specific variable, ensure that you’re testing only one element at a time.  Testing multiple variables in one test can make it challenging to identify which element led to the change in performance.  As noted above, this is especially important if your audience size is small (less than 50 viewers). 

Conducting an A/B test is only the first step in achieving sustainable improvement over time.  A/B testing is an ongoing process.  Continuously test and refine your content based on the results you gather, and to develop a better understanding of what resonates with your audience.  By systematically testing different elements, you can refine your strategies and improve your social media engagement, reach, and conversions.

You can “up your game” with A/B testing with a broad range of testing tools.  Start with your own social media management platform, which frequently provides A/B testing features and key engagement metrics to track your success.  These tools can help you set up and manage A/B tests more efficiently.

A/B testing tools to improve analysis

Here are some tools that you may use:

  • Google Optimize is a user-friendly tool that allows you to create A/B tests and multivariate tests.  The advantage of using this tool is that It integrates well with Google Analytics.
  • Optimizely is a robust experimentation platform that offers A/B testing, multivariate testing, and personalization features. It’s suitable for both web-based platforms and mobile apps.
  • VWO offers A/B testing and split URL testing. It includes a visual editor for making changes without coding knowledge.
  • Unbounce is primarily designed for landing page optimization and A/B testing.  It offers drag-and-drop functionality for creating landing pages and experiments.
  • Convert is an optimization tool that supports A/B testing and facilitates split URL testing. It also includes advanced targeting and personalization options.
  • Crazy Egg is a more advanced tool for A/B testing which also provides a heatmap function and user session recordings. It’s focused on improving user experience and conversion rates.
  • Adobe Target is part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud and offers A/B testing, personalization, and targeted content delivery.
  • Split.io specializes in feature flagging and experimentation for software and product development. It is optimized for testing new features and changes.
  • Apptimize is aimed at mobile app optimization and A/B testing. It includes support for improving user experiences within mobile applications.
  • Other applications for consideration include HubSpot (own marketing platform), Leanplum (mobile-focused), Webflow (includes web design tools), Kameleoon  and Omniconvert (both with AI-driven experimentation).

The choice of the aforementioned tools will be driven by your own platform focus, as many of these are specialized for either web-based or mobile-based content.  Other key drivers are your budget, level of technical expertise and ability to integrate these with your existing platform. 

While these tools can provide insights and facilitate large scale testing, A/B testing does not require complex tools to start out, but rather, only your ability to collect and analyze the resulting data.  The power of A/B testing is taking the guesswork out of marketing decisions. Instead of relying on intuition or assumptions (which are usually good for a starting point), you make better decisions over time based on real world data, leading to more effective and efficient marketing strategies.  By systematically testing different elements of their campaigns, marketers can optimize their efforts and adapt to the ever-changing dynamics of social media platforms.

Advanced Account Management – Calculating the SMM ROI

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Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) of a social media campaign involves measuring the revenue generated from the campaign against the costs associated with it. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you calculate the ROI of your social media campaign.

Steps to calculating social media ROI

  1. Define Your Objectives:  Clearly define the goals and objectives of your social media campaign. Are you aiming to increase sales, website traffic, brand awareness, or engagement? Each goal will require different metrics for measurement.  This step also requires that you define the time frame over which you’re measuring ROI.  Some campaigns might generate revenue over a longer period, so make sure to account for ongoing effects.
  2. Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):  Identify the specific metrics that align with your campaign goals. For example, if your goal is to increase sales, relevant KPIs might include the number of conversions, revenue generated, and average order value.
  3. Calculate Total Revenue Generated:  Sum up the revenue generated directly from the social media campaign. This could include sales attributed to the campaign, leads generated, or other monetizable actions.  This might involve using tracking links, unique promo codes, or specific landing pages for the campaign to specifically link revenue results with campaign efforts.
  4. Calculate Campaign Costs:  Calculate all costs associated with the campaign, including ad spend, content creation costs, tools or software expenses, and labor costs (hours spent by your team working on the campaign).
  5. Subtract Costs from Revenue:  Subtract the total campaign costs from the total revenue generated to get the net profit attributable to the campaign.
  6. Calculate ROI:  Divide the net profit by the total campaign costs and multiply by 100 to get the ROI percentage.

    ROI (%) = [(Net Profit / Total Campaign Costs) * 100]

A positive ROI indicates that your campaign generated more revenue than it cost, resulting in a profit. A negative ROI indicates that the campaign incurred more costs than revenue.

What’s in a number? 

What are the factors that might be directly tied to revenue but still contribute to the campaign’s success, such as brand awareness, customer engagement, and long-term customer retention? 

Is there an investment factor at play?  To what extent can the revenue generated can be directly attributed to the campaign?

What is your benchmark for success?  Can you compare industry benchmarks or previous campaigns to assess your campaign effectiveness?

Can you regularly monitor your campaign’s performance and adjust your strategies based on the results?  

The ROI metric can help you identify which campaigns are successful and which need further optimization or re-messaging.  At the same time, it has inherent limitations.  In other words, the value of social media to your branding may go beyond immediate revenue by contributing to building brand loyalty, customer relationships, and long-term business growth.

Advanced Account Management – Sentiment Monitoring

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While audience sentiment is a more abstract and subtle layer of understanding, therein lies its power – crafting themes which leverage emotion. 

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis allows you to gain deeper insights into how your audience feels about your brand, products, services, and content. This knowledge helps you understand customer opinions, preferences, and pain points.  You can better tailor your content strategy to match their emotional state.  Positive sentiment, for example, is optimally placed in the context of messaging that reinforces loyalty and sustainable co-identification with the brand.  Addressing negative sentiment can help you improve areas of concern, enabling you to better manage your brand’s online reputation. You can address negative sentiment promptly and engage with customers to resolve issues before they escalate.  Negative sentiment towards an external situation can be used as a rallying point for customers to reinforce community identity. 

Sentiment analysis relies on uncovering emerging trends and shifts in opinions, and with that, you can more effectively adapt your strategies and offerings to stay aligned with customer expectations.  Understanding sentiment not only applies to your brand but also to your competitors.  Analyzing the sentiment around your competitors can help you identify their strengths (for you to enhance and replicate) and weaknesses (for you to expose and leverage).  Negative sentiment points to specific product or service issues that need attention, enabling you to solve a problem in the market and to make advance improvements to enhance customer satisfaction.

What makes monitoring sentiment difficult is that there is no way to perfectly quantify feelings and opinions.  Data analytics relies on key words and phrases, and associating these with desired responses in engagement and purchasing.  Recognizing patterns of behavior and applying these with your messaging demonstrates that you’re listening to your customers and valuing their opinions.  This can foster customer loyalty and long-term relationships.  People are more likely to interact with content that reflects their feelings.

What can you do with sentiment monitoring? 

  • Better Decision-Making: provide data-driven guidance for marketing strategies, product development and customer support.
  • Crisis Management: understanding sentiment allows you to gauge the extent of the issue and take appropriate actions to mitigate its impact.
  • Personalization: more personalized and relevant interactions, improving customer satisfaction and increasing click-through rates and ultimately, increased sales.
  • Opportunity Identification: positive sentiment can highlight areas where your brand is excelling. You can leverage these strengths to further engage your audience and differentiate your brand.
  • Refined Marketing Messages: craft marketing messages that resonate emotionally with your audience, leading to stronger connections and higher conversions.

How can you carry out sentiment monitoring?

Incorporating sentiment analysis into your business strategy empowers you to make informed decisions, tailor your interactions with customers, and foster a positive brand perception. By addressing both positive and negative sentiment, you can build a more resilient and customer-focused brand that thrives in the digital landscape.

This analysis is no longer exclusively the domain of “rocket scientists” and back-room quants.  There are several automated tools and platforms available that can help you gauge the sentiment of your audience.  Advanced tools use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to analyze and categorize the sentiment expressed in social media posts, comments, and mentions.  Here are some popular options:

  • Brandwatch – social listening and analytics services, including sentiment analysis, to help you track how your brand is perceived on social media.
  • Sprout Social – social media management tools, enabling categorizing of social media mentions as positive, negative, or neutral, helping you understand how your audience feels about your brand.
  • Talkwalker – a social listening and analytics platform to help monitor your brand’s reputation across social media channels.
  • Hootsuite Insights – also enables understanding of the tone of conversations surrounding your brand or platform, giving assessment of content as positive, negative, or neutral.
  • Meltwater – a media intelligence platform.
  • IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding – natural language processing tool.
  • Socialbakers –social media marketing and analytics tools.
  • Lexalytics – text analytics platform.
  • MonkeyLearn – text analysis platform utilizing machine learning models.

Wrapping it up

Before choosing a tool, consider factors such as the social media platforms it supports, the depth of analysis it provides, its ease of integration with your existing tools, and its pricing structure. While these tools can automate sentiment analysis, when it comes to your own learning and understanding of your audience, nothing beats manually reviewing and interpreting results, developing hypotheses of audience motivation, and frequently testing these hypotheses through frequent and personal engagement.

Advanced Account Management – Unlocking Demographic Insights

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What can you learn about your audience by studying their demographics, and how can you use that knowledge to create better content?

Studying your audience’s demographics can provide valuable insights into their characteristics, preferences, and behaviors. This information can help you tailor your content to better meet their needs and interests.

Start with the basics – age and gender.  The focus here is on life stages and experiences.  More than just general trends among young males versus aged females, see your audience in contrast to opposing demographics to identify what makes your audience unique.  For example, content for a younger audience might focus on trends and pop culture, while content for an older audience might emphasize practical tips and advice.

Bring the age and gender analysis to a higher level by overlaying this understanding with geographic-based trends.  Knowing where your audience is located can help you create content that’s relevant to their geographic interests, in particular, keeping note of local events and holidays, and local culture in the form of cuisine, historical context, and music.  Local festivals and seasonal events are ripe for promotion opportunities.  Furthermore, with a broader geographic base of customers, language and national cultural opens up new areas to explore variations in offers and messaging. 

Beyond basic demographic indicators – and more difficult to track – are variables related to education and occupation.  These allow you to tailor your content’s complexity and tone.  A key driver of audience participation and engagement is their ability to associate themselves with your content.  Content for professionals might be more in-depth and industry-focused, while content for a general audience should be accessible and engaging.  Inversely, a highly educated audience would not prefer content that is written simply, with flashy colors or cartoon images.  This association is sometimes the most subtle, but at the same time most effective. 

Taking that analysis to the next level, a useful though exercise is to ask the question, if your audience were to design your platform, content and social media, what would it look like?  What does your audience expect to see? 

Additional demographic differentiators:

  • Interests and hobbies are driven significantly by lifestyle, location and social networks.  References to leisure activities can conjure feelings of passion, bringing a positive co-association to your brand. 
  • Buying behavior and income are key to highlighting the impact of purchasing power and preferences.  Is your audience more tailored for evaluating offers based on cost effectiveness or value-for-money assessments?  Are they focused on quality or quantity?  Does a discount motivate purchases or bring a mass appeal to your offer?  Does a “mass appeal” turn off potential high-value shoppers?
  • Family structure (singles, families, parents, or caregivers) can guide you in creating content that addresses life challenges and core needs. 
  • Emotional triggers and pain points can further reinforce emotional association to your products or services.  Pets, social issues and identity references can bring a more personal and human touch to your messaging.  These can also conjure opposition, underscoring the importance of having a full and comprehensive profile of your audience, and of the segments of your audience which are most likely to engage and spend.

Continuously monitor engagement metrics and gather feedback from your audience. Adjust your content strategy based on their reactions and comments.  At the same time, avoid overgeneralizing.  Each person is unique, and adherence to demographic expectations can risk identifying new and unexpected preferences among your audience.  In other words, keep an open mind. 

As your audience evolves, their preferences may change. Regularly update your understanding of your audience’s demographics and adapt your content strategy accordingly.  By using demographic data to guide your content creation, you can ensure that your content resonates with your audience, builds stronger connections, and delivers value that meets their specific needs and interests.

Advanced Account Management – Optimizing Posting Times

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How can a business optimize its posting timing?

Test test test.  That is the answer.  At the end of the day (proverbially speaking) there is no magic formula for determining the best time to capture your audience’s attention without some trial and error testing. 

Nonetheless, there are some notable patterns. Determining the best time of day to post on social media leverages a combination of understanding your target audience’s behavior and taking advantage of platform-specific insights.

This article provides a starting point for this analysis, and highlights key tactics to optimize your posting times. 

Optimizing posting time for audience engagement

Know Your Audience – Start with demographics, habits, and time zones. Who is your customer and what is their profile?  Other factors include age, profession, and typical lifestyle to estimate when they’re most likely to be active on social media.

Analyze Audience Insights – Leverage your data from past postings.  Keeping a close track of platform analytics will help to gather data on when your audience is most active. Most social media platforms provide insights into your followers’ online behavior.

Experiment and Track – Begin by posting at different times of the day and track the engagement metrics for each post. Over time, patterns will emerge, and you’ll be able to identify the times that consistently yield the best results.  This analysis, in particular, will help you find peak hours.  Generally, posting during peak hours (when users are most active) can maximize visibility. These hours can vary depending on the platform and your audience’s location.

Third-Party Tools – As always, there are several applications that can support this process, but which will take some time to learn.  While the best foundational knowledge is gained through sifting through the user data (did we mention above, know your customer?), there are various tools and services that can analyze your audience’s behavior and suggest optimal posting times based on the data you input into the application. 

Understand the Platform – A growing body of research in recent years has shown patterns of engagement in common social media platform.  Some platforms will prioritize content when it’s initially posted, while others might distribute it over a longer period, to enable a pattern of likes and shares to develop.

Key variables in optimizing posting time

For many social media marketers, there are some specific variables to assess in determining most favorable posting times:  

  • Commute Schedule:  When there’s nothing else to do on the morning public transport commute, many users engage with social media.
  • Competitor Behavior:  Observe when your competitors post and when they seem to receive the most engagement.
  • Audience Profile: Younger audiences are more likely to turn to social media after dinner, versus older audiences who are still attached to network broadcasting for entertainment.
  • Platform Usage Patterns: Different platforms have different peak usage times. For example, LinkedIn daytime is relatively busier than evening Instagram.

A more sophisticated analysis will track engagement statistics not just for volume, but also for quality.  Analyze when your posts receive the highest engagement (likes, comments, shares), which can indicate when your audience is most active and most open to new offers. 

As always, continuously analyze your data and adjust your posting schedule based on what works best for your specific audience and goals.  The best posting times can evolve over time as your audience changes and social media trends shift.  Regularly review your analytics and be willing to adjust your strategy to maximize engagement and reach.

Social media marketing execution plan – pet boarding case study

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Social media is a powerful tool for local businesses to connect with potential customers, and is an essential part of the marketing strategy for any small retail business.

This case study will explore specific steps a local pet boarding business can take to leverage social media marketing and achieve success.

Meet Happy Paws Pet Boarding

Happy Paws is a cozy, family-run pet boarding facility known for its loving care and personalized attention. However, they faced the challenge of reaching a wider audience and attracting new clients.

The Social Media Strategy

Happy Paws identified their target audience – pet owners who prioritize their furry friends’ well-being. They focused on platforms popular with this demographic, like Instagram and Facebook.

Content is King

Visual Appeal: High-quality photos and videos showcasing happy pets playing, napping, and enjoying the facilities are key. Behind the Scenes: Introduce the staff, their experience, and daily routines to build trust.

Testimonials: Share positive reviews and heartwarming stories from satisfied customers.

Educational Content: Offer pet care tips, highlight boarding benefits (stress-free travel!), and address common concerns.

Interactive Engagement: Respond promptly to comments and messages, fostering a sense of community.

Run contests and giveaways: Encourage pet photos, adoption stories, or boarding questions. Offer free consultations or discounts as prizes.

Host live Q&A sessions: Address pet boarding anxieties and showcase your expertise.

Leverage pet holidays: Create fun content around National Dog Day or National Cat Day.

Paid Advertising: Utilize targeted social media ads to reach pet owners in your local area. Highlight special offers or promote specific services like puppy playtime or senior pet care.

Track and Analyze: Monitor post performance and audience engagement. Identify what resonates with your followers and adapt your strategy accordingly.

The Results

By consistently implementing these steps, pet boarding social media marketers can see a significant increase in social media followers through a continually growing community of engaged pet owners. Furthermore, more potential customers will explore your services, which leads to greater interest in booking inquiries

Conclusion

Happy Paws’ case study demonstrates the power of social media marketing for local pet boarding businesses. By focusing on high-quality content, audience engagement, and targeted advertising, you can build trust, attract new clients, and establish your business as a trusted pet care provider in your community.

Finding Facebook Followers

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Increasing the number of followers on Facebook requires a combination of strategies that focus on engaging your target audience, providing valuable content, and promoting your page effectively.

How to build up your following on Facebook

Here are some effective steps to help you grow your Facebook followers:

Optimize Your Page – Start with the basics.  Did you complete all the necessary information in your Facebook page’s “About” section?  Consider this a free outline.  Use a clear profile picture and cover photo that represent your brand or message, and the image you want to convey.  Try to avoid leaving the same image year after year. 

Create High-Quality Content – Find a balance between creating good content and delaying the creation of any content.  In other words, don’t let perfection be the enemy of action.  The key here is to start out making your content accdording to the 3 C’s:  Clean, Clear and Concise.  Long verbose paragraphs about “considering this” or “remember to do that” tend to work well for clickbait articles, but do not sit well with readers who are genuinely trying to learn something about your topic.  Are you posting for clicks (there is nothing wrong with that), or are you posting to build a community? 

A well-written article – without mistakes or grammatical errors – is already “high quality”.  Over time you can further enhance the quality of your work by ensuring that there is a storyline in your prose and by improving your skills as a writer, or videographer, or graphics artist, depending on your platform of choice.  The most important step, however, is to take one.

Having said that, “remember that” sharing valuable, engaging, and relevant content that resonates with your target audience will be key to better engagement.  “Consider” inclusion of informative posts, entertaining videos, inspiring stories, and eye-catching visuals.

Post Consistently – This point cannot be emphasized enough, and beyond quality and depth of content, is the most important factor in gaining the attention of search engines and platform algorithms, which are ultimately the key to ensuring that that your content is made visible in the vast universe of the internet.  Maintain a regular posting schedule to keep your audience engaged and attract new followers. Consistency shows that your page is active, and that you regularly provide your audience with real value over time.  Your audience is always paying – hopefully they will pay you with money, but they always pay you with their time.  The better the content, the more you will earn.

Know Your Audience – Understand your target audience’s preferences, interests, and pain points. Tailor your content to address their needs and preferences.  Think in terms of solving problems.  Are you posting an article for the sake of clicks?  Is that the only problem you are trying to solve?  Think again.  What does your audience need?  What problem are you solving for them? 

Utilize Different Content Formats – With the basics of a consistent theme in place, venture beyond the standard format to experiment.  With the same “high quality” (3 C’s) approach, include images, videos, infographics, polls, live streams, and side stories. Diverse content keeps your audience engaged and interested.

Engage with Your Audience – Viewer comments are gold.  They indicate an advanced reaction, beyond the usual likes and emojis.  If someone takes the effort to write something, it means you have captured their attention.  Reward that attention by regularly responding to comments on your posts and engage in conversations.  When followers feel heard and valued, they are more likely to stay engaged and recommend your page to others.

Host Contests and Giveaways – Organize fun and creative contests or giveaways that require users to engage with your page. This can help increase visibility and attract new followers.  Keep it simple and informal.  Formal contests have rules and regulations attached to them.  False promises will give you many headaches in the future.  Future articles on this site will address giveaways and provide some guidelines.  The key to success is to engage your audience in a fun way, and if you are going to give something away for free, ensure the rules are clear and that there is only one winner. 

Promote User-Generated Content (UGC) – Encourage your existing followers to create content related to your brand and to tag your page.  Reposting UGC not only shows appreciation but also exposes your page to the creators’ followers.

Collaborate with Influencers – Partner with influencers or individuals in your industry who have a strong following.  While influencer endorsement can be expensive, it can also bring a significant boost to attention and notoriety. 

Run Facebook Ads – Invest in Facebook ads to target specific demographics that align with your target audience. Use engaging ad creatives and compelling copy to encourage users to follow your page.

Cross-Promote on Other Platforms – Promote your Facebook page on your other social media platforms, website, email signature, and any other communication channels you use.

Use Facebook Insights – Monitor Facebook Insights to understand which posts perform well and gain insights into your audience’s behavior. Adjust your content strategy based on these insights.

Join Relevant Groups – Participate in relevant Facebook groups to establish yourself as an authority and share valuable insights.  Postings to these forums can have an amazing impact on the number of followers and growth in connections because you are addressing an already-captive audience.  Follow the group’s rules and avoid spamming, because these will never engender respect.  Genuinely add value, and the payment (in their time and money) will follow. 

Share Behind-the-Scenes Content – Offer glimpses of your company culture, team members, and behind-the-scenes processes. This personal touch can humanize your brand and connect with your audience.

Promote Exclusive Offers – Offer exclusive discounts, promotions, or content to your Facebook followers. This incentive can encourage people to follow your page to access these benefits.

Keep doing these on a regular basis, and over time, your skill and efficiency will improve.  Growing your Facebook followers takes time, patience, and consistent effort. Focus on building genuine relationships with your audience, delivering value, and maintaining an engaging online presence. As you build trust and a strong community, your follower count is likely to increase naturally.

Tracking Engagement – More than just likes!

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How well is your audience interacting with your content?  The answer to this question will separate the novice social media promoters with the pros.  The good news is, it doesn’t take 10,000 hours to become a pro in tracking your engagement.  Use social media engagement metrics to enable a deeper understanding of what motivates your audience, and to determine how well your campaign is resonating with high-value readers and listeners. 

Because there are so many engagement metrics to track, chances are that if you are a beginner to social media, with enough practice you will begin to see yourself as a winner in at least one of these metrics.  With one win at a time, especially in the early days, you can find further motivation to keep tracking and keep improving your scores over time. 

Here are some common engagement metrics with a description as to how you can benefit from them. 

Likes

  • The most basic of all, and the higher number the better
  • What They Indicate: Likes and reactions (such as “love,” “wow,” “sad,” etc.) indicates a positive (or negative) reaction.  More complex or sophisticated applications enable the audience to choose more than just a like, but also emojis for “love,” “wow,” and “sad” among others.  It is the easiest and most rudimentary way a viewer can react, so not having any “likes” is like putting your audience to sleep. 
  • What to Learn: Content with many likes and reactions lets you know which types of content get the most attention, and with that, you have a basis for replication of future content generation. 

Comments

  • A deeper form of engagement, where the audience is so strongly interested in your posting that they set themselves apart (to show that you have their attention?) by creating new original content in response to your new original content.
  • What They Indicate: Comments show that your posting sparked interest.  Even if you get trolls, you can have the satisfaction that someone bothered to post some nonsense, because they thought their own version of bad taste would be seen by others. 
  • What to Learn: Read the comments and comment back – that is the most effective way to show users that you care about them and want to learn from them.  With a deeper understanding of their sentiments made available through comments and feedback, you can use that to generate more meaningful content in the future, and in doing so, begin the virtuous cycle of interest among your readers, reflected by the interest you have shown them. 

Shares and Retweets

  • Shares and retweets are likes and comments, but turned up a notch.  Shares can amplify your reach and introduce your platform to new potential followers.
  • What They Indicate: More than just a comment, a share indicates that your audience is identifying themselves with you.  A share of a posting means you have become and identity-maker.  This step is a giant leap towards a full-on branding strategy.
  • What to Learn: As always, count the shares to see which comments resonate most you’re your audience.  Go a step further and analyze what type of messaging, visuals, or information prompted users to share.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

  • CTR measures the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your post.  Are you getting any genuine action from your audience?  What percentage of your audience is entering your universe?  
  • What It Indicates: CTR shows the effectiveness of your call-to-action.
  • What to Learn: A high CTR indicates that your content was compelling enough to drive traffic. Analyze the content and its placement to understand what encouraged users to click through. As with any indicator of success, adjust your content strategy based on these findings.

Engagement Rate

  • Engagement rate is a combination of likes, comments, shares, and clicks relative to your total number of followers.
  • What It Indicates: While it is one thing to have likes, if you are reaching the next level in your engagement effectiveness, you will come to learn that certain customers (or readers, or viewers) will be engaging with you more than once and in multiple ways.  This is your bullseye target audience.  All the lessons you aim to learn from simple metrics such as clicks and likes are now compounded in complexity and, along with that, potential benefits to your future promotional designs. 
  • What to Learn: Similar to the other metrics, you can compare the engagement rates of different posts to identify which types of content perform better. Beyond that, you can begin to piece together certain character traits of your audience.  “People who wrote these types of comments also had a higher CTR, therefore that is the kind of person I’m trying to appeal to.”  Write your own version of that sentence, but with specifics to show for it. 

Mentions and Tags

  • Being mentioned or tagged by users means they’re actively involving your brand in their conversations or content.
  • What They Indicate: This metric tracking indicates an advanced level of identity on the part of your audience, and may indicate that your audience as a whole is growing more sophisticated.  Your reach is now extending beyond simple impressions or single individuals, you are being remembered in other peoples’ conversations. 
  • What to Learn: Monitor mentions to identify opportunities for engagement. Respond to mentions promptly, whether they’re positive or negative, as de facto feedback on your brand, your product, your service and your message.  Target new groups that were not previously on your radar.  Learn from the type of people who mention your brand, and look out for potential surprises – audience types which resonate with your messaging, but you didn’t expect.  What is making them interested?  Acknowledging and engaging with user-generated content can build and foster a greater sense of community around your brand.

Follower Growth Rate

  • Follower growth rate measures how quickly your follower count is increasing.
  • What It Indicates:  a metric for more well-developed and mature campaigns, it is another dimension of likes (which could gradually increase over time) and the audience’s enthusiasm over your content (how many likes in a short period of time). 
  • What to Learn: If your campaign coincides with a significant increase in followers, analyze the content you posted during that period. Determine if there’s a correlation between the campaign content and the growth in followers, and if your determination is that there is a positive relationship, then push that theme like crazy.  At some point, you may experience the thrill of a single posting that, at least in a small way, has gone viral.  You may not be able to replicate this phenomenon on a weekly basis (but you can try), nonetheless, learn what you can and try to identify the ideas you conveyed which so well resonated with your audience. 

Time of Engagement

  • Analyze when your posts receive the most engagement by studying time-of-day and day-of-week patterns.
  • What It Indicates:  This is a tactic for the pros, but essential when your promotional efforts are building a large following.  At this stage in the game, you will be trying to improve your skills not by factors of 5 or 10, but by 10% or 20%.  When you have a large audience, a mere few percentage points can make a significant difference in the volume of revenue (and profit) that you take in from a single post. 
  • What to Learn: Let every word be leveraged to is max!  Optimize your posting schedule and tailor your content to be available when your audience is most open to your messaging.

By closely monitoring and analyzing these engagement metrics, you can gain valuable insights into what content resonates with your audience, which strategies are effective, and how to improve your future social media campaigns. Adjust your approach based on what you learn to continually refine and optimize your social media marketing efforts.