Increase Your Social Media Reach
When it comes to the ever-evolving algorithms of social media giants like Facebook and Instagram, keeping your store’s organic reach steady can be a challenge. Whether you’re starting from scratch with building your garden center’s social audience, or simply trying to navigate the latest changes, here are a few quick changes you can implement with your social media channels to help increase and maintain your social impressions.
Keep it Short
For Facebook and Instagram specifically, it is important that your organic posts keep the text to a minimum. This is because of somewhat-recent changes made to the social media platforms’ algorithms that place a higher emphasis on organic images and videos that will garner more engagement.
When posting to these platforms, make sure you’re keeping your text to a minimum of one to three sentences at most. Also, avoid using links in the text when possible on Facebook (you should NEVER use links in text on Instagram); instead using the rich link preview that Facebook provides.
Video Content is King
Did you know that social posts containing video see over 48% more engagement and interaction, with a share rate of 12x that of generic text and/or static image posts? That’s because social media algorithms place a higher priority on seeing organic, engaging video content above almost anything else.
If your garden center isn’t using videos to tell your story, showcase your latest products and more, you’re missing out on valuable real estate in the social media news feed.
Be Social
Another way you can help boost your company’s social media impressions is to drive engagement on your organic posts — and a good way to do this is by interacting with users who are interacting with you.
When someone comments on your video or post, don’t just leave them hanging — like and comment back! You can be witty, helpful or even complementary, just as long as you keep it professional (you don’t want your garden center to seem rude or unbecoming to current and potential customers). By engaging with those that are engaging with you, Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms will see a high-performing post, helping your content to show up higher in the news feed — and, in turn, bringing more engagement to engage with.