Welcome to the Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business podcast. I'm your host, Roz Chandler, a flower farmer for over ten years and thirty years as a business owner and Marketing Director. This podcast is for you if you're an ambitious flower farmer, and looking for hints and tips to grow your business, we'll be covering strategy, marketing tactics, pricing, social media, and upscaling your flower farm. So much more. I'm so excited to introduce you to my amazing guest speakers along the way. All of you will be at different points in your business. Our podcasts will take this into account. We look forward to joining you on your journey.
Hello, today I thought we'd talk about social media. Now it's everywhere, isn't it, and everyone's talking about social media and it can all become a bit overwhelming. But I just want to give you some easy tips to follow on social media success.
So first of all, why would you even bother? What does social media do for your business? It can increase brand awareness, it grows a much larger audience, you connect with your audience, you can start engaging in meaningful conversations because traffic to your website can obviously make sales off it and increases lead generation which can obviously lead then to sales. So social media stats are quite wide open eyewatering. So at the moment, they say there are 2.8 billion Facebook accounts worldwide. At 2.8 billion, Facebook still leads the social media landscape with 59% of all users combined. Instagram has more than 1 billion active users and really explains why Facebook purchased it. So let's dive in with our top tips.
Number one, setting your goals. We always say this, right, of any sort of strategy. Set your goals. What are you trying to achieve? Social media needs to form part of your overall marketing strategy. You need to write your goals down. If you don't write them down, they're hard to measure and hard to achieve. What can social media do for your business and what investment are you prepared to make, both in terms of paid social media, so in terms of money investment, and in terms of time, which is a much bigger investment. Set your objectives. So numbers, you know, I want to achieve 10,000 Instagram followers in a year. I want to achieve, and cut that down, so what does that mean on a monthly basis? And how am I going to do that? Be specific about your goals. Lots of people talk about SMART goals. I hate SMART goals. I've talked in another podcast about why I don't believe in SMART goals. Measurable, achievable, it's not really your goal. It's not something to aim for if they're attainable and realistic and timely. So I would say, go much better for big, hairy, audacious goals. Strive for much more. Really strive for what’s the massive amount of growth you could get on your social media platforms and go for that.
Number two, who are you talking to? We've mentioned personas before. And we've mentioned using Pinterest boards to build your personas. And this is nowhere more important than it is in social media. Look at demographics. Look at the solutions you can provide to your users’ problems. Always, always engage with people who are on your social media platforms and comment on their posts. Survey them and ask them what they'd like more of. Shart to get closer to this audience. If you get closer, build relationships, you're building trust. We run lots of competitions through our social media platforms and I've talked about tools that enable me to do that in my tools podcast. You may wish to get together with others and collaborate on bigger prizes. The bigger the prize, the bigger the engagement. Offer something your audience want. So a competition we often run can be, you can win some seedboxes, and that's to flower growers. Or we might do a podcast competition, and it might be to offer the latest high-tech headphones. So plan that in.
Number four, plan your content for every channel and schedule it in. This is quite important. Instagram and Pinterest are more visual than the others and Facebook groups love content. So I would recommend you build some Facebook groups. So think about the channel and the demographics that sit when each of those channels.
Number five, try not to sell on every post. It's really tempting. People will switch off. People want to build connections in social media, and then they'll buy from you. If they trust you, they'll buy from you.
Number six, think about the different types of content. So video is a good one to add in. Facebook and Instagram lives are great too. According to Facebook, you can see six times the engagement with a video post than any other post. Also, with Instagram reels, for instance, quite a new addition to Instagram, you will notice the engagement and reach is much higher than in any other posts.
Number seven. Images, images, images, I can't stress how important this is. We do a brand photo sheet shoot here at Field Gate Flowers at least twice a year. We build Pinterest boards that are the kind of images we want to collect. And we probably take on each brand, shoot maybe 200 photographs. We then use Canva, a tool I've talked about in my tours podcast, in order to edit and use those images. Those images will build your brand. And I have to say without them it's really difficult to run a social media strategy.
Number eight. Connect, connect and connect. Interact with everybody and Twitter chats, retweet on Twitter, do surveys. Give your honest opinion. Build Facebook groups, and always respond to everybody. So it's about connections. Think about social media as a connection platform.
Number nine. Think about all the channels. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Where are your customers? What are they doing? What age are they? Go back to your ideal customer, your ideal customer persona and work out where they are.
Number 10. Using tools, scheduling tools. There are lots of them. You can schedule directly into the channels or you can schedule using a tool like Buffer, which we do.
Number 11. Absolutely, my number one tip in social media is to start a Facebook group. What is a Facebook group? We've done a podcast on Facebook groups and I do recommend that you give it a listen to. A Facebook group will build a relevant audience for you, with people that are interested in what you do. It increases web traffic, you can promote your products and services in it. You engage with a relevant audience with common interests to what you're doing. You build your email list and it increases your sales. Why wouldn't you build a Facebook group?
Number 12. Promote between the profiles to cross-pollinate. And always, always try and collect email data. Remember that you don't own Facebook or Instagram or any of the social media channels or the right to be on them. But if you collect your own email data, as long as you do it in regulations of GDPR, you do own this email data and therefore you can start building relationships. I would try and collaborate with influencers in your market space. That’s really important.
Number 13. Keep ahead of the trends. It changes so fast. Tik Tok, Instagram reels and the latest edition which is still in beta testing, is Clubhouse. So at the moment, you still need an invitation to join Clubhouse but I'm sure that will change very soon. And Clubhouse is an online conference, meeting, a meeting place actually, with people who've got common interests and I recommend you look Clubhouse up. But then it comes with a big health warning. Social media takes lots of investment in time and money. We do or I do all our own social media. Social media is so important to our business. I wouldn't outsource my own social media but I do understand why people do. It has to be a major part of your marketing strategy, and it cannot be ignored. So I advise you to start with looking at your content strategy and putting social media at the top of the list. Many thanks.
This has been your host, Roz Chandler. If you'd like to know more about growing your cut flower farm, do join our Facebook group. It's called Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business. Many thanks.