Social media marketing has rapidly become an increasingly influential presence in the sales world over the past several years. With more and more companies and individuals joining social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest each year, these online networking tools have grown into an undeniably powerful name-making and brand-establishing tool when looking to build one’s business.
Recent market research performed by content marketing analysis companies such as comScore, Digitas, and Brandwatch have shown that this holiday shopping season (November and December) has already demonstrated all-time highs in terms of the number of people shopping online, and this December is predicted to continue to set new records for online shopping activity. If there was ever an opportunity to take full advantage of the benefits of online marketing and spread the word about your restaurant or foodservice business, now is the time. But how do companies go about getting noticed in what can sometimes seem like a hopeless sea of user-generated noise? The answer is simple: produce good content.
Producing good content that social networking users will be compelled to share with others is the fastest way to grow your business’s online presence. It seems like a non-starter to advise those who are trying to expand their business to simply “produce good content,” but the quality of your content really does have a significant impact on the online influence of your company. Well-edited, meaningful, and original content is much more likely to be shared by the other members of your social networking sites and noticed by search engine ranking algorithms than hastily constructed articles and advertisements that lack useful information. Online communities have a knack for naturally filtering out the good from the bad, and it can often be difficult to recover from being labelled as the latter.
In a lot of ways, content sharing is the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising in the physical world. Producing content that users will share on social networking sites is becoming an increasingly powerful way to get the name of your business out there, especially for restaurants and small businesses that may not have the resources to launch larger “real-world” advertising campaigns. Creating content that is relevant to your company’s brand, product, or services will help spread awareness of your business, even if the content is not immediately related to selling your product. A restaurant focused on waste reduction and environmentally friendly cooking and cleaning practices, as one example, would see a lot of benefit from routinely posting articles, infographics , and quick tips about easy ways to reduce food and kitchen waste in both the home and commercial kitchen.
This holiday season is stacking up to be one of the largest surges in online shopping and social networking activity in history. With so many consumers bouncing around the various social networks this month, there is almost no reason not to get the name of your business out there and take advantage of their share-ready attitudes. Bring some extra traffic into your store or restaurant over the holidays by setting aside some time to create and promote a campaign of high quality, original, and easily “shareable” content.
