Are you trying to grow your food business? Offering your customers good food is crucial but it is only half the picture. Today, social media is one of the best way of promoting your business. Often free to use for businesses, social media is where you can get a new audience without the cost of running a major traditional marketing campaign. The social networks come with many benefits but they are not all apparent. In this guide I will train you about the best tactics that will give you authority in social media. My aim is to help to grow your food business without spending a fortune.

1. Use them all

All social media platforms can help transform your food business. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, are some of the best marketing tools where the business owners can keep in contact with their clients. All these platforms use different styles and have different customer bases and objectives. It will be advisable to use all of them so that you can reach out any possible interest.

Twitter: start by setting up a Twitter account for your food business. The account should have the company name and logo and your profile should be completed with all information. It seems obvious but you will be surprised to see how many business have incomplete profiles, it does not really look good.
You should send tweets to your customers regularly. Twitter has a very fast content flow which is rapidly consumed by its users, this will ensure that all your customers are kept engaged. When you maintain an active twitter account, you will not only inform your customers about your business but you can also use as a customer care service platform, as many brand do so now.
An interesting feature of twitter is ability to use hash tags, you should use them to help users to find your content.

Facebook: in the past, Facebook was used as a communication tool between school mates and friends. However, as times went by, it grew exponentially becoming the largest social site ever. Business owners are now using the platform to promote their business and you should do the same. Facebook is also working hard to ensure that it is business friendly by adding new marketing tools all the times (find out who is visiting your pace with Facebook insight). Starting a Facebook page for your food business will be the first step. Post interesting and fun items on your Facebook account to attract clients regularly. Here the pace is much slower (when compared to twitter). It is a good idea to post on facebook at strategic times when your users are online. Start the easy way, post some content about your business and ask your friends to like and share it, you might be surprised to see your content going viral with little effort. If you think that the average person has 300 friends on facebook it does not take much to get more eyeballs on your business.
Instagram: Instagram is an image-driven version of the social media networks. At the moment, the site is owned by Facebook, so it is growing fast and you might be want to be in there too. You can use your phone to snap a picture and post it to the platform. The most distinguishing feature of this platform is that you can play with the appearance of the photos using the filters giving them a cooler look. As you do food, taking pictures of your succulent preparation is a win win move for your business. Ensure that your shots are neat and enticing, instagram user will like and share them.

Create written content

You need to create good content for your food business by starting a blog. Since you are an expert in your field, you will increase traffic to your site and in the process gain more customers. Write articles and share them on social media. Writing original content is always the best option as the search engines will help your site get the best exposure. If your content is copied no one will link to it and as such it will defeat the purpose of writing content in the first place. Focus on creating strong headlines for your content as this spark interest and invite readers to your site. The headline is as important as the article or post itself. Research shows that 80% of people will read your headlines but only 20% will read the content. Make your content actionable to give the user a sense of how they can get to apply the information.

Pictures: be visual

People usually learn differently. Some will learn better by reading while others prefer images. Most people however prefer visual aids and as such use pictures, diagrams or videos so use them to better illustrate your points. Visuals will help to sustain the concentration of your readers to your content. Nobody likes to look at plain texts and paragraphs unless they are reading a textbook. Add images that add value to your content and be careful to avoid boring stock photography.

Run giveaways, give your products to social media user and blogger, use their feedback to your advantage.

You can give offers and coupons to people to get discounts at your food store. Most people like gifts and discounts this will encourage reciprocity, you give them something your customers will write praising words. Offer exclusive coupons to social media followers for example $10 0ff their next order. Allow for feedback from your newly acquired customers asking them to review your services and post them on social media. Make sure to take their feedback seriously and offer positive response. The reviews from social media users will help to promote your business further. Most customers will only be interested in something that has been proved to work for others and they will go through the reviews to see what other social media users are saying about your business. Address negative responses and appreciate the positive ones to create a transparent and friendly online persona online about your business.
It is also a good idea to give free products to influencers. Influencers are bloggers with many followers and they might act as testimonial for your business. So go ahead and offer freebies in exchange of honest reviews. The reviews can be then shared on social media to generate more energy and buzz around your business.

Social media competitions are fun, introduce them in your food business

Do you know that contests can help promote your food business? These contests can be done through social media platforms. The winners of the contests should be awarded prizes that are good enough to convince more people to participate. Everybody loves free food. You can use fun games such as picture caption contests in exchange coupons in order to engage your social media followers. Pick one or a few winners with the most creative comments and send them a free coupon to use the next time they visit your food store or restaurant. These contests are a quick win for both the fans and your restaurant too. There various types of contests that you can run on social media ranging from riddles, trivia questions, photo contests, fill-in-the blanks to caption contests. You do not need huge budgets for this you just have to choose the ones that works best for you and your social media fans.

Be a brand

If you need your food business to grow fast, you must make it a brand. Always make sure you act like the big food companies in the market. These companies use different strategies to make their business successful, copy them. It is advisable to emulate what they do. Use their marketing ideas on your food business, and you will become successful. You can learn many valuable lessons from the big-brand approach to social media. The following are some of the things that you can emulate and will surely work for you.

• Find where your customers are talking and go deeper – Choose a platform where you have the highest fan base and post a content or promotions. You will be leveraging the promotion on a platform where you are sure to get the highest visibility, giving your followers an incentive to become loyal to your brand.

• Create amazing content that will get people talking about – Only give visitors the content they need in order to spark a conversation. Create engaging and thought provoking content that leave readers with questions. Have an important and promising introduction and throw in a story somewhere within. People love stories and as such it can be an antidote for boredom and it can also help clarify a point in your blog post. A good introduction will come in handy as it can help people make quick judgments about your blog posts. If it’s boring they won’t even think of reading it.

• Use your social media accounts to listen to the customers – You need to be available to your audience in real time to have more meaningful back-and-forth conversations. Auto-posting might be an effective way to communicate to your customers but it is one sided as it does not allow for feedback from the correspondents. However, engaging with your social media fans in real conversations will add more value to your social stream and bring your food business better results. You can also frequently update you posts and content to assure your audience that you are there.

Small businesses really need a social media marketing strategy as much as large corporations need one. It may even be more important for a small business owner to take the time to get their name known on a large forum such as Twitter. This can seem like a huge undertaking but actually once you get going it’s quite easy to keep up with. There are a great many mistakes that small businesses can make to undo all the good their social media campaign offered the business. If you follow the tips below, you won’t make any mistakes and your Twitter will become a favorite with your followers.

Twitter might help your small business to find new clients – source

Keep it Real

You never want to lie or to offer anything that is not true on your Twitter feed because this produces a lack of trust between you and your followers. Just keep it real and tell it like it is to a certain degree. This doesn’t mean that you should use your business account as a platform for your personal opinions, you have a personal account for that, but when it comes to your company be honest. If you are asked for something that you cannot provide, rather than saying you can do it and then outsourcing the project for a profit, send your follower a link so they can do it on their own. This saves your customers’ money and they are more inclined to purchase from you at a later time.

Build Lasting Relationships with Customers

It is important to build lasting relationships with your customers so they want to continue following your business feed. For instance, if you own a restaurant and a customer tweets about how great the food was, retweet their post and thank them for it. You could go as far as to engage them in a conversation about what their meal was and what about it they liked the best. Offer them a small discount for posting about your company. You can also do this in the brick and mortar building. Any diner who tweets about your food automatically gets ten percent off their meal. This tactic works in any industry and builds a lasting rapport with your followers.

Never Spam Your Followers

Once of the gravest sins that a business can make is spamming their followers with a plethora of tweets intending to drive traffic to a website or brick and mortar store. Twitter should be a fun place where you customers and followers can find something of value out of your tweets. Even if they only get a laugh out of a tweet you made you are engaging, not spamming them. While you can certainly use Twitter to promote your company, there is a huge line drawn between what is considered spam and what is considered a good tweet. Learn it and know it if you want to keep your followers.

Small businesses everywhere are learning the benefits of having a good Twitter account where they can get real with their customers and build lasting relationships with them too. Just remember to keep the spam posts to a minimum or you may find your company no longer has a Twitter account because you’ve been reported. Nobody has time to fight a spam claim so just make sure that all your communications are top notch and you’ll do fine.

Samantha Murphy is a huge Twitter fan. When she’s not sharing her day with the Twitterverse, she also likes telling others how they can get more from Twitter via her articles.