Reinvigorate your business with social media (I): Facebook

Social media has arrived and promise to democratise everything. There are no excuses left for not directly communicating with your business’s audience and showcasing the virtues of your products or services. Today, more than ever, social media is indispensable for almost all businesses.

And it doesn’t matter if you sell water bread, savoury pastries or pains au chocolat crème; whether you’re a café or a bakery, you have to have an online presence. Because a good product that’s not shown off will find it very difficult to succeed.

Nowadays, thanks to frozen doughs, which allow you to have the artisan and quality products your customers want, you have everything you need to succeed. Frozen pre-baked bread, with the characteristics of the best traditional bread and the option to bake it whenever you want, is one of the stand-out foods, but you can also offer many kinds of pastries. Besides being very tasty, frozen doughs for bakery and pastry shops are a very profitable option.

With this in mind, you just need to know what you have in your business and why. Take a look at the following tips to make your establishment’s Facebook page a success.

Recommendations for your Facebook Page

Does your business have a Facebook page? Do you want to create one? This social network makes it possible to do so quickly and easily. And it’s no trivial matter: according to the data platform Statista, Facebook will once again top the ranking of social media with the most active users in 2021, with approximately 2.7 billion. You just have to be on Facebook.

To create a Facebook page, just log in with your account and create a business page. You don’t need to worry about your personal details, as they will not be publicly linked to this page. Once you’ve created it, you should fill in all the data in the best possible way: image, information... the more you provide, and the more accurate it is to the reality of your business, the better. Because, if one thing is clear in the world of social media is that honesty is essential.

Once you have a Facebook page, you have to start making it more dynamic. How? The following tips should help:

• Post content regularly. Social media values consistency above all, so it’s a good idea to have a schedule and publish content periodically. Publishing three posts in a week and then not doing so again for a month makes little sense; rather, it is better to always maintain a constant rate of publication.
• Put quality before quantity. You may be tempted to share a lot of content, but the best option is in fact to provide value. This is what will make your audience want to follow you and get involved. Therefore, instead of publishing a lot of content, you should prioritise the quality of that content. What could you publish? Articles, videos, suggestive images... At Less Drama Cakes, in Madrid, and Coffee Corner, in Valencia, they  do this very well.
• Know your audience. You should ask who you want to follow you on social media. If it’s your customers, try to get to know them as much as possible so as to offer them posts that may interest them. For example, you might run competitions and promotions on special dates and announce them on Facebook. Your regular customers will surely be interested in keeping tabs on you.
• Be careful with your spelling and communication style. In the digital world, using capital letters is taken as shouting. So, when interacting on social media or publishing content, try to ensure your spelling is correct, since that will show that you treat well not only your products, but everything related to your brand. If your communication style is light-hearted, you’ll probably use emoticons in your posts; if, by contrast, it’s more sober, you’ll not use them and make your style a little more serious. Choose how you want to communicate with your customers and be consistent in doing so.
• Interact with your community. If there’s one thing social media allows for, it’s that it makes it easy to talk to your followers. Don’t hesitate to ask them questions, do some fun surveys and, of course, always answer their messages in a respectful, attentive and friendly way. The more you involve your audience, the more you’ll improve engagement (brand commitment, as it were).
• Have a defined and consistent strategy across all your social media channels. This suggestion applies beyond Facebook, but it’s important, because your communication style should be the same on all your channels, so your brand image is consistent.

Besides these suggestions, there is another fundamental you must carefully cultivate: patience! Social media is a long-term journey where you have to persevere and be patient to grow. I’m sure that with these recommendations, you’ll get ahead a little faster.