Loving Locally Through Social Media
At BNL Media Consulting, you know how much we love social media. It’s an eat, sleep, breathe type of love. We’ve watched the social media landscape transform since the birth of BNL. The algorithms have changed, the trends have evolved and the platforms themselves have grown and changed. That got me thinking about how important it is to use social media ourselves to help local businesses. This was the foundation of why I created BNL Media Consulting.
Social media is ever-evolving like we mentioned, and if you’re ready to really help small businesses, showing up online for yourself and your community is the way to go. BNL is all about supporting the local love, so be sure you’re following each one of these tips approved by yours truly so that small businesses may thrive forevermore!
Engagement is forever.
Our absolute #1 piece of advice is to realize how important engagement is on social media for small businesses. Think about engagement as the primary way you are connecting to your community. This accounts as your likes, comments and shares. Of course, you want to increase your follower count, but what’s most important is having an engaged audience and being an engaged audience member on your fav accounts.
Spend time engaging with your favourite small business accounts. Comment on their posts, share them to your Stories, like and save photos for future viewing. All of these actions are SO important today to ensure that small businesses get as much exposure as they can. Marketing budgets are much smaller with local businesses so they rely heavily on the support of their organic community and local cheerleaders like you!
Sharing, stories and staying social.
Are you big on sharing on Stories on Instagram? Stories are used by over 500 million users every day. One-third of the most viewed Instagram stories are from businesses. People enjoy seeing what businesses are getting up to!
As an individual, sharing on stories and tagging businesses is a great way to showcase your favourite places, give your favourite businesses exposure, and have the business reshare your story!
When you share an experience from a business that you love or had a great experience with, it gives other people (your friends and family following you) the encouragement to check out that business for themselves. People love to have good experiences, buy well-made products and support people doing amazing things. Especially nowadays. Sometimes they just need that little push from someone they know who enjoyed their experience with a business.
So, next time you’re out on the patio for drinks, browsing a local store or have a great experience with a local company be sure to share it to your Stories or feed and show the love!
Tag, you’re it!
While we’re on the tagging train, let’s just dive into just how important tagging on social media is! If you’re posting on Facebook or Instagram about a business that you either visited recently or adore, you need to tag them in the post for them to see it! Hashtags are great, but many businesses don’t follow and keep up to date with posts with their brand’s hashtags. Hashtags are more relevant for other everyday people to search out exactly what they’re looking for.
When a business is tagged using the @ symbol, that business will receive a notification and will be more inclined to view what they’re tagged in.
Tagging allows them to see your grid post shouting out the business as well as an Instagram Story. If you’re on Facebook and are recommending a business to someone or sharing about your experience, be sure to tag them there as well!
Posting on the grid.
While Instagram Stories are a huge component to being a great referral place for small businesses, it’s still very necessary to post on your feed. Sharing your experience through the power of what we like to call in the social media world; user-generated content, you’re able to bring the brand experience to life in a unique and more permanent way! Whether you post a single image, carousel post, an IGTV or a Reel, what’s important is you’re posting something permanent on your account’s feed so that your followers can go back to reference the awesome businesses you’ve referred!
Sharing all different types of content in different forms will help spread the word about all the amazing local businesses you love and want to continue to see thriving. If you’re stuck on what to share, we recommend looking to that local business’s feed and see what other people are posting about. Is there a really cool wall that people like taking photos of? Is it a cute coffee shop and a lot of people take bird’s eye views of their coffee? Whatever other people are doing, you are more than capable of doing it too. AND it helps the business you love to continue to have new customers coming through and engaging with their brand in a similar way! It’s all about using the power of word of mouth, and the power of a collective community in the online world!
Be a social media cheerleader - share positive experiences, help spread the word on local businesses doing good and don’t forget to tag them in the post!
Comment and like and share the love.
The Instagram Algorithm doesn’t want you to miss important posts from your friends and accounts that you love. So, when you scroll your feed, you will see that posts aren’t shown by when they were uploaded. They are shown based on who you regularly interact with.
So, if you want to see certain posts from certain accounts, you must like, comment, save and share those posts! Instagram will study your past interactions on the feed and then show you the accounts that you interact with the most.
Support your favourite people, bloggers, businesses and organizations. Share the love with them and Instagram will reward you for this behaviour!
Breathe Nourish Love your social media account.
You’re ready to click “upload and share” and start using social media to support your local community and to showcase all of the love for different businesses. We totally understand the nerves when it comes to utilizing social media, but BNL Media Consulting is here for you!
Follow @bnlsocial on Instagram to learn even more ways how you can leverage the power of Instagram to connect with your community and support the local movements that inspire you! And, don’t forget to check out our other blog posts too. We love writing engaging content that helps support people on their social media journeys.
