Week 14 - Social Media Strategy

This semester has been really eye opening for me. I really had tried to stay away from Social Media.  I work in the computer field and really didn't want to spend all day at the computer and then have to come home and keep up with social media all night. However, I've found myself pretty ignorant and not understanding how to use it.  I started out the semester with the intention to understand more about social media for our Online Church, since I thought that would be a good way to reach new people and let them know that's available, but what I found was that there is really a good social media presence for New Song already... though it's not effectively promoting Online Church.  But that's a topic for discussion with them.

I then shifted my focus to our family business that my husband runs. I was actually surprised that social media will be a good way to reach out for our business.   We don't have any employees besides my husband, and really don't have any budget to invest in paying for advertising.  In spite of this, I do think that developing a strategy for social media is to our advantage.  I think there are plenty of things we can do with no budget that will work for us. However, we will need to probably phase in various different types of social media so that we can keep up with them.

Facebook will be our main strategy to begin with.  I liked the way that you could develop different groups of people and target them with different types of information.  We will develop strategies to reach:

• Individuals that are interested in BBQ and entertaining in our San Diego area. These are people that could genuinely be interested in the covers that we provide.  
• Restaurant owners and managers that have outdoor seating areas as we can and have provided covers for tables and chairs to protect them from getting ruined by sun and salt. 
• Corporation facility managers who may have equipment that need covers that are outside. 

For each of these groups we will develop a marketing strategy, since they wouldn't all be interested in the same types of information. 

I think our posts would probably be once a week, since that is what the search engines look for. Honestly, I don't think we could come up with enough interesting content for more than once a week. Posting pictures of our covers, recipes for people entertaining, tips on how to more effectively use your grill, and calls to action asking for contact about covers will be what we will focus on.  Hopefully over time we'll be able to dream up some other categories that will be interesting. 

Twitter will probably be our next focus, as there can be conversations that occur that would let us know about people interested in finding covers.  The fact that we are such a local business, really limits the reach that we would have with this. We would have to monitor it for a while and see if we would even get any interesting information.  As I searched during class, there really wasn't much that I could find. 

Pinterest may be a place to post recipes and pictures of the covers, so we could look into that, as Instagram might be a place to post pictures. 

So, with our limited budget, we will be looking at doing things that don't cost anything or very little.  Despite our budget, I think we could still benefit from using social media.