SOCIAL MEDIA GUIDE FOR COFFEE SHOPS

Embrace the power of social media to effectively harness connections with current and potential customers.

SOCIAL MEDIA BEST PRACTICES

1. Define your social platform(s)

• Determine who your core audience is and what platforms they spend the most time using.
• Don’t spread your resources too thin. It’s more important to do one or two platforms very well than to try to take on all platforms and not be able to provide regular, meaningful content across channels.
• Alakef recommends zoning in on Facebook and Instagram.
  • Why Facebook?:
    • Sheer volume. 72% of all online women and 62% of all online men use Facebook.
    • Target the right demographic.
      1. 78% of 30-49 year olds use Facebook
      2. 65% of 50-64 year olds use Facebook
      3. 41% of 65+ year olds use Facebook
      4. 77% of adults who graduated college use Facebook
    • Facebook Advertising is the most targeted and least expensive form of advertising.
  • Why Instagram?:
    • Instagram leans towards a much younger audience than that of Facebook, appealing to teens and young adults with its straightforward, photo-centric design and ease of use.
      1. 72% of 13-17 year olds use Instagram
      2. 64% of 18-29 year olds use Instagram
      3. 40% of 30-49 year olds use Instagram
      4. 21% of 50-64 year olds use Instagram
    • The platform also is more popular among women than men, with 39% of online women using Instagram vs. 30% of online men.

Alakef, why are you not recommending Twitter, LinkedIn or Youtube?

While these platforms might be right for some coffee shops, we are recommending Facebook and Instagram as a way to maximize your time, so you can focus on building a stronger social presence and focus on “getting it right” with fewer social platforms.

We are also recommending Facebook and Instagram so you can focus on platforms that align with your demographic, and the ability to drive traffic to your page and shop.

2. Define what types of content you promote

• If you already have a social media presence, good for you! If that’s the case, we encourage you to look back at your posts over the past 6-12 months and gain insights. What types of posts performed the best? What types of posts/creative drove the least engagement?
• Once you familiarize yourself with patterns and general themes, decide if anything is missing.
• If you don’t have a social media presence (and even if you do), heavily review competitors’ accounts. These don’t have to be competitor’s in your town or even the state. Seek advice from national coffee shops or even other types of food and beverage industries to gain insight and inspiration.
• Create a categorical approach to content. This means that everything you post needs to fit within one of these buckets. Having a consistent approach to your content will drive trust with your followers and help you build and maintain a strong social following.
  • Examples of content buckets could include daily features, new products, customer features, events, etc

3. Develop and maintain your brand voice

• Areas of social media content that need to be consistent in order to build and keep trust with followers:
  • Replies
  • Call to Action Phrases
  • Captions
  • Social Media Bios
  • Direct Messages
  • Visuals
  • Ads & Promotions
  • Hashtags

4. Research competitive analysis

“Competitive analysis is essential to understanding your industry, who’s talking about you and who has the most engaged audience.”

5. Devote time to community management

Engage and interact with your followers to humanize your brand and tap into new insights

6. Create S.M.A.R.T. social media goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time Specific

7. Build a content calendar

• Your content calendar doesn’t have to be fancy. It can be built in excel and is meant to keep you and your team on the same page with content creation and posting. Content calendars can be excellent ways to ensure you are sticking with your defined content buckets, posting regularly, and assign tasks to responsible parties within your company if needed.
• We also recommend utilizing a social media scheduler for Instagram and Facebook.
  • A scheduler, such as Later.com, allows you to upload your media, enter copy and schedule out posts and stories in advance that can be set to automatically publish to your sites at optimized times.
  • A scheduler is helpful for building out strategic content in advance and allows you to spend less time posting to Instagram and Facebook and more time growing your business.
  • A scheduler such as Later.com allows you to visually organize your content before posting.
  • Later.com allows you to collect user content from Instagram. This can be helpful if you advertise a hashtag in your business, encouraging customers to tag you and post content to their own accounts.

RECOMMENDED SOCIAL MEDIA GOALS

HOW TO LEVERAGE FACEBOOK

HOW TO LEVERAGE INSTAGRAM

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY LEADERS TO FOLLOW FOR SOCIAL TRENDS:

• Hootsuite’s Blog: https://blog.hootsuite.com
• Sprout Social’s Insights: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/
• Later’s Blog: https://later.com/blog/