Here’s a brief Belly tutorial on connecting with your customers via social media, plus a list of social media posting ideas.
Using social media to stay connected with your customers is more important now, during COVID-19 business restrictions and recovery phases, than it ever has been for your business. Not sure what to post about? Not sure how to do the posts? Let’s dive right in and get you up to speed!
The Belly social media interface
Using Belly to handle all your social media posts couldn’t be simpler. Once your web address and social media sites are set up (which we probably helped you set up when we activated your Belly account and set up your iPdad), you can create a social media campaign in no time.
Here’s what the social media posts setup tool looks like in your Belly Command Center, and the five easy steps you take to build your social media campaign:
- If your message is specific to a single store region or location, choose the right store/location in the field at the top of the form.
- Fill in the subject line, which will only apply to certain social media platforms.
- Optionally give your message a headline, as we have done above.
- Write up and format your message. If it’s an offer, you can probably just copy-paste it from your Belly email campaign, where you have already created an offer.
- Choose which of your social media sites you want to publish it to simply by clicking the checkbox at the left of each social media site form field. If you have already set up your business social media sites, you will know because it will display your full social media site address when you click the selection box to the left of it. If you haven’t yet done this, call Belly support, and they can set it up for you on the backend.
And that’s it! Just click the Continue button to go to a confirmation page and you are done.
Social media: What to say to customers during COVID restrictions/recovery
When you’re company is not able to offer services, or may not be able to offer them all due to certain restrictions, maintaining your customer relationships via social media will be more important if you are presently restricted from offering your usual service or products. Unless you plan to go out of business, now is the time to build your social media connection with customers! If they are not able to come to your business, social media might be the best way to reach them, or possibly even the only way to reach them right now if you don’t have their contact info to do an email campaign or a business-to-customer text message.
Here’s a list of topics to spark some ideas for posts.
- Share empathy — Especially for businesses unable to do business at all, social media is a great way to let them know how much you miss them and appreciate them, and how you can’t wait to get them back in your store!
- Build empathy — Any business that can successfully give their brand a personality that uniquely represents their stores or the shopping experience can use social media to build that personality, to inspire customers to love them all the more! Consider doing posts about what you are doing to help out your employees in these hard times, or to talk about efforts you are taking in the community as a business to help individuals or the community itself, or even just share how all this downtime has you and your team it
ching to get back at what you love doing — something they can relate to. (For example, this Facebook post is from our favorite coffee shop, located just across the street from our office. What a great use of social media to build empathy and support!) - Inform of changes — Since the rules keep changing regarding what your stores can or cannot do, based on changing regulations or recommendations from official sources, your customers will not know how they can do business with you today unless you tell them. If you are reducing or expanding hours, if you are adding new services or finally getting to restore old ones, if you are establishing new safety protocols to make customers more comfortable — these are all things to share immediately with your customers.
- Be funny, relatable — Humor is the best medicine. People like to laugh. Be the business that gives them a chuckle, especially when there’s plenty of stressful news elsewhere. Obviously, use taste. Ideally use humor that connects to and supports your business. For example, if you are a coffee house, there are plenty of funny memes about coffee or coffee drinkers that your customers will likely appreciate.
- Promote currently available offers — Make sure your customers know what you are able to offer them right now, even if it isn’t the full complement of your regular products and services. If there are three local restaurants, and you are the only one doing promotions and offers, they will think of you first.
- Back-in-business offers — Your most loyal fans may jump at the chance to do business with you once again as restrictions are lifted. But not everyone will do that, especially since they lost the habit. Jumpstart your ability to offer services again by not simply telling them that, for instance, “We are finally opening our dining room beginning Monday 8 AM." but also pique their interest with an offer, such as, “So, let us welcome you back with 25% off any order over $15!”
Got any great ideas of your own? Tell us, and we will share with other readers so they can benefit.
