Smart ideas that can help maximize your shop’s exposure
The biggest challenge florists share with me when it comes to social media is sourcing content and when they should post. Quick answer for content? Be authentic about your business—social share with the world what goes on day-to-day at the shop and tout your floral expertise. In regards to when, it’s tricky because the goal is to get maximum exposure for your posts. Fortunately, data exists of when customers are online and using specific social media. So this month, we share with you best content creation practices and a recommended weekly posting calendar.
SOCIAL MARKETING MEETINGS
Social media is ideally real-time marketing but this doesn’t sync with a typical shop schedule. What we recommend is having two meetings a week on say Monday and Thursday, to chat with your team about shop activity. List scheduled promotions like weekly specials, and event or occasion work scheduled for the next few days such as any weddings, events or special occasions of a customer that’s noteworthy—be sure to get their permission to share. Of course, much of this work just pops up daily, so consider keeping a log to jot down and share at the next meeting.
CONTENT CREATION PROCESS HOW-TO
Next, staff can start identifying post ideas from last week’s activity or think of posts that could serve as promotions or teasers for upcoming events. Now, dedicate about 30 minutes to an hour to write three, four or five posts or however many you can muster. However, don’t feel you need to be a professional writer. Just share basics of the event, the flower varieties (and colors) you used, why they work well at a particular venue, and whether it matches any trends of which you are aware.
The tone of posts should be conversational as if you’re talking about your work with a customer in front of you. Write two to three sentences at minimum. Lastly, extract about three to five keywords that you feel capture the essence of the post—think flower variety, event theme, colors, venue and trends.
Also, get into the habit of taking photos of everything. You’ll want to have at least one or two photos per post, so take five (to have choice). And if possible—capture a quick video! Take a couple of video caps of 20-30 second clips max. The secret of capturing good quality media is ample lighting—outdoor is best, fluorescent is the worst, and using your smartphone as your main capture tool (we’ll cover this more in an upcoming column).
USE HOOTSUITE
As we covered last month, Hootsuite is an awesome social posting tool since you can post to several media and most importantly, schedule these posts. This allows you to dedicate a block of time in your busy schedule. By now, your posts are written and although you can blast out the same exact text to all, we strongly consider tweaking posts for different audiences.
For Facebook and Google+, go ahead and send the post as-is— don’t forget to include photos (or video). For Instagram and Pinterest, choose your best photos and tweak text for a younger audience. Then distill the post down further to 140 characters for Twitter. For all posts, add a #hashtag to words you identified as keywords within the post text to garner traffic from searches such as #rose, #flowers, #blueiris, etc.
OPTIMAL POSTING TIMES
OK, here’s the skinny on when to post: post to Facebook on Thursday or Friday—1 p.m. to get the most shares and 3 p.m. for the most clicks; for Twitter, weekdays are best for b2b tweets, weekend for b2c tweets—after 5 p.m. is best for retweets and noon and at 6 p.m. for highest clickthrough; Saturday from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. is ideal Pinterest posting time; and Mondays, off work hours for Instagram.
Click here to download and read the 2016 Floriology article Social Posting: What and When.
Hello! I’m Renato and serve as Vice President of Digital Strategy and Education at 
