Connecting to the Now

For many people, the key benefit of social media is letting friends and family know, at this very moment, what they are doing. This immediacy presents a challenge to small business owners, who find that they must balance this need for immediacy with their messages with the needs of running their own businesses on a day to day basis.  How do small businesses manage to create timely messages regularly?

The simplest way to do this is to use social media to talk about what is happening at your store today, tomorrow, and in the week to come. Lisa Hartwick, owner of Hartwick’s Kitchen Store, plans a lot of in-store events and uses social media to both promote the events and do a ‘recap’ of the events after they happen. 

One reoccurring event is a monthly baking contest, where customers bring in a specific baked good that they’ve created: at the start of the month, Lisa announces the baking category (one month brownies, the next month croissants) on both Twitter and Facebook, and then  follows up by reminding customers via Twitter up until the contest deadline. Then she uses Facebook and Twitter to announce the winners.

The Tattered Cover Book store, in Denver, and CD World in Eugene Oregon also use social media to announce events. These stores regularly featuring  visits from authors and artists from outside of their home areas, so these visits  are special opportunities for customers to interact with their favorite artists.  Customers are encouraged to  ‘live tweet’ from the events,  which adds to the word of mouth value.

In addition, both bookstores and record stores receiving new releases each week. For CD World, many of their tweets and posts focus on: timely notifications about new music in the store or even new movies opening up in the area.

The stores  also announce re-releases (one popular one was when Iggy Pop released a record on purple vinyl, and it was available at limited places around the country). In this way, these stores have turned into an information hub about the entertainment venues in the market where they operate.

The yogurt store Qoola, based in  Vancouver, Canada, has a different take on immediacy. Qoola uses Vancouver’s notoriously bad weather in the winter as a promotional tool. When it is raining outside, and business is slow, Qoola uses Twitter to invite customers to come in and tell them that ‘rain sucks’, and in return the customer gets a free topping for their yogurt.

This sense of immediacy, of being in-the-know, helps customers feel like they are part of your business and this often encourages them to share information about your business with others, thus starting and maintaining the word of mouth process. How do you handle immediacy in your social media?

– Kim