Social media marketing tips from the independent retail sector

When I opened my small greengrocer shop in 2010 after a long career in arts marketing I knew that social media would be a central element of our marketing and publicity mix. As with every campaign I'd worked on in the arts, there was a robust evidence-based strategic plan and it was all set out in our business plan:

• Our community is important to us so we want to connect with local people
• It's free to use - our marketing budget is close to zero
• We eat with our eyes and we want to use lots of images
• We can connect to other like-minded businesses
• It's two way - we want to hear from our community
• We know it's not for everyone but there are enough people using it to make it worthwhile
• The results are instant and measurable

I started the shop’s Facebook page (facebook.com/ClementineofBroughtyFerry) as soon as we had signed the lease on the premises. This gave us about five weeks before the shop opened. This was a similar timescale to some theatre productions I had worked on, so it felt like familiar territory. This is the same familiar territory we all inhabit – there aren’t enough hours in the day so we have to prioritise. Our focus, to date has been Facebook which has been really successful in generating instant sales and building the community that’s so important to us.

We had a rough idea of the tone we wanted to use - informative, conversational and fun. Always positive without being sickly. My business partner and I have different writing styles but we've come up with a voice that appears fairly consistent and even when we could see inconsistencies, we soon realised that our likers absolutely couldn't care less.

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