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.
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.
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.
There are different guidelines about the best practices for posting on various platforms:
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.
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.