Mount Vernon Lisbon Community Development Group’s latest entrepreniueza event featured tips on social media use from social media manager Anna Wilson.
Wilson, the owner of The Local, has been Visit Mount Vernon-Lisbon’s social media manager for the past year. In that time frame, she said she has grown Facebook and Instagram feeds for CDG by more than 1,000 new followers. That increased follower count has increased the reach of CDG up 82.7 percent on Facebook (146,809 vs. the original 80,366).
People have especially interacted with more of the Visit MVL postings, with 15,8000 total interactions.
The Facebook visits to the VisitMVL Facebook page have also grown 94.8 percent.
Wilson’s first piece of advice to many of the small businesses who are already using social media – if what you are doing is working for you, keep doing that.
“There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel,” Wilson said.
If it isn’t, however, she recommends starting slow and focusing on one or two social media platforms to utilize where your customers are located.
“The next thing is to be consistent with your posts, roughly the same time of day,” Wilson said.
Finding the voice of your brand or company is also important.
Feel free to share photos of your space, your products and other things.
“You should always operate with a 7 to 1 or 10 to 1 model in mind,” Wilson said. “That means for every seven behind the scenes post, hours update, or education piece, you get the opportunity to remind customers to purchase your product/buy from you once.”
Wilson said the most important thing is that your social media feed grows by you interacting with other businesses.
“You have to participate in their content by liking, sharing or commenting,” Wilson said.
One thing that helped her with the VisitMVL site was as she was posting, tying into groups or organizations with larger followers.
“If I’m ever posting about Mount Vernon in general, a lot of my posts might have had a tag to Cornell College,” Wilson said. “That’s because that’s more than a thousand followers of that college, from current students to alumni who might want to see what is being posted about the college.