INBOUND ACCELERATOR

Social media and video seem to be made for each other, but are you making the most of the opportunity?

A few statistics to know:

• 54 percent of consumers say they want to see more videos from brands and businesses they support.

• 72 percent of people would rather learn about a product or service through video than through text.

• Viewers are 95 percent more likely to remember a call-to-action after watching a video, compared to 10 percent when reading it in text format.

(Source)

When you first opened your spa, chances are you had a business plan. It spelled out the details of income and expenses, employees and services, hours and location, and all the other bits of information your bank or other financial backers wanted to know. It spelled out how you would succeed.

That business plan probably also included at least a rudimentary marketing plan — how would you get the word out and bring customers in?

One key benefit social media has over many other types of marketing is its ability to engage followers in an interactive way. It is not just a passive medium.

And by engaging followers, you not only increase their involvement with your page, but also expand your exposure to others as their own contacts see when they like, comment or share your content.

It can be easy at times to focus on just one marketing channel at a time—focusing on your local media advertising when the TV or newspaper ad salesperson knocks on the door, but thinking about something totally different when you sit down to dedicate time to social media.

The problem is that when you do that, without considering an overarching marketing strategy, you may send mixed messages, or at the least, lose out on opportunities to make each of your channels work more effectively by building off the others.

So, you’ve created your social media accounts, and you’ve scheduled a steady stream of posts for the next few weeks (after considering the best times and days for them to appear). So you can just sit back and relax for a while, right?

Sorry. No.

When was the last time you scrolled through your Facebook feed and saw an image that just wasn’t right. Maybe it was a profile photo on an account that awkwardly chopped off the top of someone’s head. Or maybe it was like these “postcards” from a page I like, but am constantly frustrated by:

You already know that social media posts have a fleeting lifespan (Get More From Your Content: 21 Life-Lengthening Tips), so it is important to not only post frequently, but to target your posts to the time of day your followers and target market is most likely to be using social media.

If your social media accounts are well-established, the best strategy to follow is to use the insights available through both Facebook and Instagram to see when your specific accounts get the most traffic and when your followers are most active, both by days of the weeks and by time of day. Schedule your posts to hit just when the most followers are active to maximize readership.

(Dig further into the data with the instructions here: What Your Small Business Can Learn From Facebook Insights.)

Social media is a fast-moving medium. Unlike a billboard, which is there for days or weeks at a time for all passing motorists to see, a social media post is fleeting. The half-life (or the time it takes a for a social media post to achieve half of the total views it will acquire) can be less than a half-hour on some platforms. It is really only there to be seen for a short time.

(See our best tips for healthcare providers on social media, including how to keep accounts and content fresh here: How To Conquer Social Media To Increase Web Traffic For Healthcare.)

As a spa owner, you only have so much time available to manage your marketing efforts because you are also juggling dozens of other management tasks from ordering supplies and greeting clients to setting up schedules and, possibly, making sure the garbage is taken out at the end of the day. You don’t have time to be on every possible social media network.

Instead, focus your energy on the top networks your best customers are using.

In most cases, that will be Facebook (used by nearly 3 of 4 American adults), and Instagram (used by more than half of all young adults under age 30, an age group less active on Facebook).

Who will you find on social media?

The short answer is almost everyone! But where you will find different demographics of people — meaning different target markets — varies by age, education level, career and gender.