As a business owner and a budding cafe entrepreneur, you are likely wearing many hats at the same time. On top of running your cafe day-in-day-out, you are in charge of the post-operational activities as well as the sales and marketing of your brand. The next thing you know, you’ll find yourself racking your creative juices to think of content ideas for your social media handles. Conceptualizing is one thing. You have to create, publish and promote, too!
Earlier, we discussed that while social media is a must-have in creating an effective marketing strategy, there will come a point where you will feel that managing your content can potentially pull you away from the core of your business - as if it were a never-ending cycle to think, create, and post only to do these all over again.
While we at Bean & Barley are happy to provide social media marketing strategies for your brand, in this blog we list some time-saving but certainly efficient hacks in managing your cafe’s social media content.
The First Hack: Automate your posts.
This allows you to avoid repetitive tasks of uploading and scheduling. It saves you plenty of time from having to spend hours scrolling and posting your content on every platform that your cafe is in.
You can refer to content scheduling apps like Later, Sendible or Agoraplause to create and auto-publish your content ahead of time. You can also utilize a built-in Facebook application called Creator Studio inside the Business Suite. You can even download the mobile version and schedule from your phone.
After you have decided on your content’s running theme and general mood with an engaging caption to boot, you can schedule as much as one week to one month ahead. Several platforms are available with their own built-in scheduler. You can schedule posts for Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and more. Imagine the sheer convenience of having to do it from one platform instead or jumping from one web to another.
Automating your posts saves you the anxiety of missing a post or failing to post at the appropriate time. It also gives you the added benefit of being able to plan and see the trajectory of your content for a whole month instead of looking at it one day at a time.
The Second Hack: Document, don’t create.
There is this cliche that goes along the lines of the best things in life happen simultaneously.
In approaching your social media content, try not to think or plan too much at first. Look at each moment, each activity in your cafe through the lens of opportunity. They need not be grand in thought or execution which later, can be hard for your audience to digest. Anything you do behind-the-scenes, whether you are in prep mode or in post-event can serve as an appealing and engaging content if you put it in the right context.
This is a good way to blend in spontaneous posts with your polished, branded and professional content. In a way, posts that show you or your team at work also provide that sense of authenticity and relatability that most audiences nowadays look for in a brand they are keen on supporting. Again, the mindset that goes with this hack is shifted from merely creating to documenting your day-to-day activities to providing your target customer an insight on how your cafe is run.
The Third Hack: Repurpose Your Material.
Let’s get one thing straight: repurposing is different from recycling.
When you repurpose a content, you are adapting the idea for a different format. Repurposing comes into play when you make every single one of your posts unique. Eventually, it will be easy for you to run out of content or ideas on what else to post.
There are two parts to repurposing a material: pillar content and micro-content.
Basically, pillar content is the main idea or the umbrella content that will set the topic, the mood and the foundation for a certain group of posts you are about to make. This can be a blog article about coffee that you posted on your website, a livestream, an archived video and more. For each micro-content that you build, you are linking the audience back to your pillar post to provide consistency.
From the pillar content, you will then be creating micro-contents which are still photos or animated GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format) related to your main idea. There might be topics or key aspects of your pillar content that you want to explore more in a post.
Here’s the challenge: for the micro-content to work effectively, it has to stand alone and provide significant value even without the pillar content. They cannot be incomplete in thought. Your audience will not have the time or the patience to look at the puzzle as a whole. They need to get enough value from the micro-posts you created.
Tip: As you make an outline for your pillar content, identify the parts that you can focus later on. This will give you an idea for your micro-content.
The Fourth Hack: Content Quality Over Quantity.
Do not be pressured to create too much content only to produce little value. Your posts, if not utilized well to send the proper message, will be wasted as your audience will highly likely scroll past them. The numbers of impression and reach will be there but the ROI or conversion won’t.
In planning which content to create, categorize your posts into two: evergreen or ephemeral.
Evergreen content refers to those that are of high-quality and are applicable all throughout the year. This is the type of content that continues to be relevant long past its publication, so it brings in traffic regularly. You can always link your audience back to these posts since they never lose their value.
Meanwhile, ephemeral content is time-sensitive in nature. It brings in a lot of attention but only for a short or limited period of time. These posts are generally short-lived and seasonal like the payday and Yuletide season sales. They generate a lot of buzz or hype only to die down soon.
Deciding where to devote your time in planning matters.
The Fifth Hack: Choose 1 or 2 Platforms Only.
You might be compelled to think that the more exposed your brand is to different platforms, the higher the visibility. This is not necessarily true. Not only is this inefficient but it eats your time, making you all the more busier than you already are.
Until you have a dedicated social media manager or you have already plotted your content scheduling plan, you can always begin with at least one or two platforms that feel most right for you and your cafe brand. You do not have to be everywhere at once.
Just like with the previous hack, prioritize quality over quantity in deciding your platform for it is more beneficial to be a content creator that provides value in fewer platforms than to spread your brand too thin everywhere else.
It is important to understand your target audience, their characteristics and their behavior.
Facebook is good for community-building. Instagram generates awareness and aesthetic appeal. Users shop on both of these platforms as well.
Pinterest is known for its value-added content in the form of pins and infographics. Youtube and Tiktok are good for videos with instructional content and testimonials.
For starters, identify which platform does your brand thrive the best. Try each platform, get a hang of the interface and decide where you will devote a part of your time to.
The Sixth Hack : Take Advantage of UGC
UGCs are user-generated content in the form of reviews, testimonials, blog posts or recommendations. It is named as such because the posts come from your followers themselves.
The value in prompting more UGCs in your platform is that they feature your coffee brand. You can hold simple contests with giveaways for people who leave feedback on your wall or tags or mentions you in their stories.
Customers like it when they have interesting activities to do along with supporting your brand. UGC is a powerful tool because it is your followers who are doing the marketing for you. If you can provide a space for them to produce content, all you have to do is curate and share them on your feed or timeline so that potential customers of your cafe will be motivated to do the same.
The Seventh Hack: Create a Routine
Not everyone is a good multitasker. While you can, this might become a tall order for cafe entrepreneurs like you.
It will become a challenge for you to go back and forth from Facebook to Instagram to Twitter while tweeting and uploading captions with hashtags, creating content and sourcing images that go with your story all at the same time. If this sounds overwhelming in writing, it’s all the more consuming in real life, too.
You will benefit from grouping similar smaller tasks by batch. You’ll find a comfortable rhythm in posting and uploading later on. For example, your chosen topic is Why Your Brand Is The Best Specialty Coffee in Town.
Tasks that need conceptualization can be done first. You may want this post in a photo, a story or a video format. Once this is complete, you move on to create the visuals for each type, refine and edit then you can finalize after. This allows for a smoother progression in your tasks instead of jumping from one task to another.
The Eight Hack: Understand the Trends and The Hashtags
Ever saw something trending and you felt immediately that your brand identifies with it?
Join the #hashtag and find a way to relate your promotion into it. This is not to say that you have to jump on the bandwagon. You can capitalize on what is trending but make sure that you understand the story and the purpose of the hashtag. In what context is it being done? Is it relevant enough for your needs? Does it not feel forced?
If you don’t find the relevance or connection with your brand identity and your target market, skip it.
Haven’t figured out exactly what your target audience is? Bean & Barley can paint you a picture of your target persona.
The Ninth Hack: Delegate and Delegate
As much as you would want to initially control every aspect of your business, there will come a time where customers are swarming in. Your focus and energy will best be directed in the core of your business such as franchising or branch expansion.
It will fall upon you to set the actual direction, strategy, and tone of your social media handles, but you can delegate the execution to a colleague. You can start with a content calendar and build the details for them which will serve as a guide.
Imagine how much others could contribute to your cafe’s social media activity with the insights they could share. Hearing from specific people in a cafe business makes your content feel more approachable and relatable.
Your social media platforms are an extension of your brand and website. They bring the voice to an otherwise faceless personality. But the work it takes to get the right pitch or set the perfect tone for any post can be a bit too detailed. There is no denying that it is very demanding of your time, and you don’t want to overlook anything important.
We suggest using these social media hacks to make the art of managing your platforms more enjoyable, easier from the getgo and more efficient in general. You can communicate and reach so many different types of people as you experiment with the platforms that work best for you. At the same time, these hacks can help build your cafe’s reputation. You can speed up your ideation, brainstorming, conceptualization, creation, and execution process. This allows you to get much more activities done with your time.
Do you need help in optimizing your cafe’s marketing strategies? Message us HERE.
Reference:
1Alexandra, K. (2021). Low Key Social Media Hacks for the Busy Social Manager. Bulkly. Retrieved 18 May 2021, from https://bulk.ly/social-media-hacks/.