Social Media for Small Businesses and Retailers

As a brand retailer, social media is your voice! Use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms to meet your customers where they are.

Social Media is a Powerful Marketing Tool

Customers expect to find you on their favorite social media channels. 90% of shoppers buy from stores they follow on social media. What’s more, people now often turn to social media instead of a search engine to look for a business. Your retail social media presence can boost your chances of showing up in search engines, too. Google crawls social media for keywords just as it does your website.
social media icons

How Small Businesses Use Social Media

Retailers are finding all kinds of creative ways to use social media to reach customers. Chances are, your competitors use it — generally in one or more of these ways:

  • To share attractive product images
  • To communicate about what brands they carry
  • To express their store’s unique personality
  • To engage in conversations with customers and potential customers
  • To syndicate the content they create for their blog and other media
  • To provide customer service and support as needed

Social Media Challenges for Small Retailers

Social Media for Small Businesses and Retailers
Some retail businesses make social media look easy. It’s not. Engaging customers through social media takes more than just posting whatever comes to mind. It requires its own marketing strategy, using a content calendar, thoughtful planning, and the ability to act on results. Accomplishing all of that takes time and resources, which you might prefer to dedicate to other areas of your small business. These are some of the challenges you may encounter while managing your social media presence:
Social Media for Small Businesses and Retailers
Lack of access to high quality, branded content

Quality imagery costs money. Simply taking photos of products in your store will not convey the professional image you need or show the products in their best light. In addition, you may not have access to high-quality versions of a brand’s logo or other assets they use in their big budget marketing.

Social Media for Small Businesses and Retailers
The struggle to post in a timely manner

Social media engagement happens in the moment. You need to keep it fresh and post at the times that your audience is online. If you miss them, they may never see your posts.

Social Media for Small Businesses and Retailers
Inability to manage multiple channels

Before jumping into a social media plan, it’s important to know which channels your target audience uses. It varies by age group, interests and lifestyle. Three quarters of the public uses multiple social media platforms, and you may struggle to keep up with even one. Each has its own specifications for size and formatting of images.

Social Media for Small Businesses and Retailers
Lack of consistency across your social content

Part of establishing your retain brand within your industry is consistency. It may be tempting to entrust your Twitter account to one employee, your YouTube channel to another, and your Facebook page to a third. Or, you may post content of differing quality and tone depending on how much time you have to devote to it. Without an overarching strategy, you will present a disconnected image to your target audience.

Social Media for Small Businesses and Retailers
A simple lack of time to make it all happen

Running a retail business means never having enough hours in the day. With the many responsibilities of operating a business, managing employees and providing customer service, marketing tends to fall down the to do list. Without adequate time and energy devoted to it — which you may not have — your social media strategy will suffer.

Lack of access to high quality, branded content

Quality imagery costs money. Simply taking photos of products in your store will not convey the professional image you need or show the products in their best light. In addition, you may not have access to high-quality versions of a brand’s logo or other assets they use in their big budget marketing.

Lack of access to high quality, branded content

Quality imagery costs money. Simply taking photos of products in your store will not convey the professional image you need or show the products in their best light. In addition, you may not have access to high-quality versions of a brand’s logo or other assets they use in their big budget marketing.

The struggle to post in a timely manner

Social media engagement happens in the moment. You need to keep it fresh and post at the times that your audience is online. If you miss them, they may never see your posts.

Inability to manage multiple channels

Before jumping into a social media plan, it’s important to know which channels your target audience uses. It varies by age group, interests and lifestyle. Three quarters of the public uses multiple social media platforms, and you may struggle to keep up with even one. Each has its own specifications for size and formatting of images.

Lack of consistency across your social content

Part of establishing your retain brand within your industry is consistency. It may be tempting to entrust your Twitter account to one employee, your YouTube channel to another, and your Facebook page to a third. Or, you may post content of differing quality and tone depending on how much time you have to devote to it. Without an overarching strategy, you will present a disconnected image to your target audience.

A simple lack of time to make it all happen

Running a retail business means never having enough hours in the day. With the many responsibilities of operating a business, managing employees and providing customer service, marketing tends to fall down the to do list. Without adequate time and energy devoted to it — which you may not have — your social media strategy will suffer.

Overcoming the Challenges: Automated Social Media

Savvy social media managers are always looking for opportunities to grow their audience. Automation holds the key to expanding your reach, along with alleviating many, if not all, of the above challenges. Social media automation means setting content to post on a regular basis, to the right channels with perfect timing. You can still choose to post on the fly when there’s something unique to share, like an in-store event. However, you can outsource much of the heavy lifting. Here’s how social media automation makes your life easier by:
  • Sourcing polished, professional content from the brands you carry — content they invest in heavily
  • Monitoring the social landscape to know when your customers are active online and timing delivery for optimum visibility
  • Posting to the right channels, and multiple channels at once
  • Keeping content consistent across channels
  • Saving you valuable time and people power

To get started with social media automation, find the software that fits your needs and budget.

Social Media Automation Software

Social media automation software is a tool for planning, scheduling and syndicating content, as well as gathering analytics on the results. It lets you plan your content holistically, perhaps a week or a month at a time. With a high-level view you can ensure a strong rotation of different types of content and different products, each at the right cadence. You can schedule certain pieces of content to post multiple times if you need to. The best automation software will even adjust the timing of posts automatically, based on the times your target audience is using a certain social media channel.

ThumbStopper Stands Out Among Automation Platforms

ThumbStopper’s turnkey solution automatically maintains and posts brand content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google My Business. You get the benefit of high-quality assets that brands are already producing. You get all the benefits above and more, specialized for key retail verticals.
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Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It's one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience - with your accessible, branded content - in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
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