Today, social media for jewelers is a critical part of any marketing strategy. For jewelery retailers, social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, are fast becoming the number one platform for reaching your potential customers.
Billboards, radio ads and print ads still may have their place, particularly for jewelers in small towns, or local jewelers with a strong presence. However, for many others, social media cannot be ignored as the fastest, most direct way to find and reach your target audience.
Defining your target demographic is the first thing you need to do.
Once you know who you want to reach, then it’s time to create a social media plan. What’s in a social media plan? Simple: it’s the content (images, text, video) you want to promote, scheduled to go live at the times you want, and targeted via the social media platform to your ideal audience.
Here are some questions about social media for jewelers to guide your planning and strategy.
What content should you be posting on social media?
Your content is based on the personalities and interests of your chosen demographic. Let’s say you are targeting a more senior audience. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking only young people are on social media. Far from it, many older people are also using social media on a regular basis. For mature customers with more disposable income, you may prefer to advertise classic, more expensive jewelry designs. If you are targeting millennials on the other hand, you might be focusing on new exciting trends, or engagement and bridal jewelry.
Whichever your target audience, make sure your content is interesting and relevant to them.
When should you be posting and how often should you post?
There are different guidelines about the best practices for posting on various platforms:
- Facebook The best time to post to Facebook is during the afternoon workday slump, which typically occurs between 1pm and 4pm. This is after lunch, and most people will take little breaks throughout the afternoon to perk themselves up. What are they doing on those breaks? Checking Facebook! Use this to your advantage to post your most interesting content. The best days of the week to post are typically Thursday and Friday. Everyone is looking forward to the weekend and Facebook helps that time go by faster. However, you should posts every day of the week and whenever you have great content to share. Post once or twice a day, so you don’t overwhelm followers. If you’re posting too much, it may frustrate readers who will either unlike your page, or hide your posts, which drastically decreases engagement.
- Twitter The Twitter world is often accessed at lunch time. Since tweets are so short, it’s easy to peruse them while taking a midday break. Include pictures with at least half of your tweets to capture the attention of your followers. For maximum reach, include 1 to 2 hashtags, but stop there. Three or more will decrease interaction which is the opposite of our goal. Keep weekend content on the lighter side. Weekends are for people to enjoy, not to work, so give them reasons to enjoy reading your posts.
- Instagram Instagram may be one of the easiest social media sites to use. Choose a picture, upload it, write some hashtags, and send it off. But it is important to pay attention to optimal times. Many followers will go on Instagram during their commute to and from work, so post during those times. Followers expect a steady pace of posting. This can be once per day, or several times, as long as you keep it consistent.
- Pinterest Pinterest is your virtual scrapboard. It’s where you can show your fans your beautiful jewelry designs or amazing diamonds by pinning pictures and articles to your pinboard. Posting consistently throughout the day will bring you the best results.
Are you posting to the right audience based on timezone?
For local jewelers who are targeting a home-grown audience, posting at regular times of day will be sufficient. But if you have customers in other time zones, take that into account. Allow your schedule to follow optimal hours in each specific timezone. A helpful hint here is to create a chart to track the hours you plan to post, and mark your local time and the time at the other destination. That way, you don’t need to do recalculate every time you post content.
Is your social media plan working?
No plan will work immediately. Give it time. Review the results every 2-3 weeks and see what’s working and what isn’t. Adjust your plan accordingly. Every audience is different, so the type of content and quantity will vary. You may find that you actually need to slow down on posting to Facebook during the week, but increase it on weekends with lighter content. While the absolute minimum to be posting to Twitter is 3 posts a day, you may find that more will work better. Larger companies will post throughout the day with a spacing of one hour between posts. Since the average life of a tweet is not very long, your content will disappear quickly. However, you need to work with what you have. It may not work for your company to be posting every hour to Twitter, and that’s ok.
For jewelers who want to up their social media marketing, a planned-out posting schedule does not take long to create and will save you hours of work every day. Remember this social media mantra: Plan, post, analyze, and adjust. Try this yourself and see where it takes you.
