Cake Decorating Business #6: Social Media and Your Online Presence

Part #6: Social Media and Your Online Presence

Social media has become a part of our daily lives, and it’s important for businesses to have a presence on those platforms. Social media is anywhere online where there is immediate interaction with people or potential clients – so Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and myriad other sites and apps where we interact on a smaller and more constant level than we do in places like our website.

One of the problems with so many social media platforms is that it can eat up an enormous amount of our time, and sometimes it just does not pay off. It’s important to understand why your business is on social media in the first place. Although some businesses claim to get a lot of their work via social media, traditionally it isn’t considered a great driver of direct sales. As an example, most people do not actively ‘shop’ via social media. They are more likely to get a recommendation from a friend or Google what they need and then check out your social media profile to find out more. So the sale actually came from the friend or the Google search, while the social media page gave them more information about your business which then helped them make the decision. Social media is good for having immediate, relatively “close” contact with your customers and it’s a good way to keep your business forefront in their minds. If you are trying to build a global brand because you have global products (downloadable tutorials, e-books, or you would like to teach internationally) social media can be a great way to build an international following.

You need to decide what the purpose of your social media is – is it building that global audience, interacting with current customers, recruiting new ones or something else? Once you know why you are using it, you can decide how to use it and which platforms to use. It’s a lot better to have great content and great engagement on fewer platforms than try to be a little bit across all of them. Trying to be all over them but not doing a great job at any of them isn’t helping your business in the long run.

Social media can be both a fun and effective tool for marketing your business, but if you’re spending hours and hours on it and ignoring other forms of marketing, you need to reevaluate. Business owners are often time poor, so we need to spend our time wisely. As an example, if you’re wanting to build up your business locally because you can only serve you local area, it’s probably best to market more in local places -schools, churches, social groups, cafes, whatever other businesses are around you that you can work with or for. The relationships you make locally, in person are likely to pay off a lot sooner than the ones you make on social media.

Since we all want to be a part of social media, and it’s important for all businesses to be involved, here are some basic pointers for succeeding at using it as a marketing tool:

• Find out when your target marketing is using social media and post at those times. Facebook has great statistical information (in the “Insights” of your page) which tells you when the most amount of people will see your posts. While you might be awake finishing a cake at 3am, nobody else is online to see it.
• Keep your business page professional. It’s not the place to rant about your competition or complain about other customers.
• Don’t make every post about selling something, aim for a good mix of posts which help your customer to solve their issues or make their day better.
• Use only those social media channels which are relevant to your target market. If your target market is older Mums, you’re unlikely to find most of them on twitter but you probably will find them on Facebook or Instagram.
• Create a social media plan as part of your marketing plan. Exactly like other marketing activities, using social media needs to be planned and executed so you can test out how well it’s working for you and adjust as needed. You don’t need to plan every single post, but you should have set goals for it, know it’s purpose, and make it an extension of your brand.

It can be very easy to get sucked into hours and hours of time online because it’s interesting, it’s fun and it’s very quick. It’s a lot easier to write a status update about a class than it is to design a flyer for a class that you then need to distribute, but ideally you should be doing both. Social media needs to be a part of a larger marketing plan for your business rather than the only thing you are doing to market your business.

Written by Michelle Green 2014, Copyright The Business of Baking