Keep Your Social Media Content Fresh This Summer
It’s almost summertime and the perfect time for your small business to capture the attention of new customers! Use these tips to get your social media summer-ready to engage with consumers looking for great local businesses as they head out with family and friends, explore new cities, and try new things.
1. Create a summer content calendar
The beginning of the summer is a great time to start scheduling out your next few weeks of content. Any new photos of your business, great customer reviews, or positive press that you’ve collected over the past month make excellent additions to the events and seasonal content that you’ve already planned ahead for the year. By keeping your content timely, varied, and centered around a seasonal theme, you’ll keep your customers engaged and excited to see what you have coming up through Labor Day. And, it’ll save you some time as summer revs up your business and brings in new customers.
Variety and timing are key when putting together a content calendar for any month. Outside of operational updates, plan to post two or three additional posts per week. Rotate the types of posts you’re using — for example, post a photo of the exterior of business showing off your great patio, a photo of your team or product, a graphic highlighting a special summer event, and a photo posted by one of your fans. Over the course of the month, you can reuse some of these concepts, but try to use each type of post on your content calendar only one or two times per month
More on creating a content calendar for the whole year here.
2. Run an Instagram contest
Running a contest on Instagram is an effective way to nudge your followers into action and offer them something special this summer. Some popular types of social media contests include:
Caption contest: Post a photo and ask your followers to provide the caption. Best caption wins!
Tag a friend giveaway contest: Post a photo using the word “GIVEAWAY” in the caption and give your followers instructions on how to enter by tagging a friend in a comment on the post. (For example: “Tag your favorite lunch buddy to enter.”) And let them know when a winner will be chosen.
Photo contest: Ask your customers to post a photo from your business, and choose your favorite to win a coupon, free appetizer, or free blow out. (Bonus: you can use the photos as social media content going forward.)
3. Celebrate unofficial holidays
From Constant Contact, pay attention to events and unofficial holidays:
According to their blog, “the calendar is a great place to look for inspiration.In addition to major holidays like the Fourth of July and Labor Day, there are also some lesser-known holidays you can tap into for fun and creative content ideas.”
But, they point out that it’s important to ensure that you only post about the holidays that are not only relevant to your audience, but holidays they would find interesting and engaging.
Example: Friday, June 1st is National Doughnut Day.
Do you run a bakery or a coffee shop? Post one of your donuts in a team member’s hand, next to a cup of coffee, or — you can take an aerial shot of the doughnut on a table encouraging people to come by and try one for themselves.
Don’t run a bakery? Not to worry. You don’t have to be a bakery to participate — here’s an example of a brewery having some fun with National Doughnut Day:
4. Provide seasonal educational tips
When you think of summer, you’re probably thinking of backyard BBQs, beachtime, sitting by the pool, ice cream, fireworks, and sunshine. So are your customers!
Post the summer-themed content your followers want to see and add a tip they could use in your caption to make it extra engaging. Here’s an example of a local diner giving their followers some grilling tips for the summer:
5. Share user-generated content
When consumers are out on their summer adventures, many are posting and sharing everything they’re doing with their friends and followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — in posts and in live stories. In fact, in the summer of 2015 alone, Facebook activity increased by 26 percent. They’re sharing their favorite meals, road trip stops, sunsets, and activities on long summer nights — and chances are, they’re sharing content about your business. Here’s the good news — you can use that content on your own channels!
Monitor your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts by watching your mentions, comments, and likes — and see who’s talking about you online. When you find a photo from someone talking about your business — go ahead and repost! You can use a reposting app, or you can simply tag that user in your caption and thank them for sharing. Here’s an example of a local ice-cream shop taking advantage of user-generated content:
For more content ideas, keep an eye on our blog. We’re always posting great tips to help small business owners save time.
