The Singh’s Premier Facebook page has over 13,800 followers. Mandeep Singh, who runs the Sheffield-based business with twin brothers Vrinder and Baljeet, gives us his top tips on how to make a success of Facebook:
- Make sure you use your time efficiently - I spend an hour and a half per day on our Facebook page.
- Be active every day - some people say no one uses their page, but they haven’t posted anything since Easter! You’re the engine behind it. You need to be switched on and active.
- Read and respond to every comment or message to maintain momentum.
- Setting the page up as a Public Group, rather than a business page, makes it more accessible.
- Make your promotions look professional. We pay a university student a monthly fee to design posters for us flagging up promotions and competitions. I send him all our deals and a brief with logos. He works for one hour a week.
ESSENTIALS
- Always post a picture. People are lazy and they need to see the image to attract them, otherwise they won’t read your post.
- Integrate with your staff through videos and photos.
- Use your store’s brand where appropriate – our staff always wear branded tops in photos.
CONTENT
- Competitions are a must – we run three or four product giveaways a week – the more the merrier! The cost of a giveaway is so little compared to what you get back. There are no purchases involved in our competitions – it’s all based on a ‘like and share’ mechanism. These are posted as a mix of promotional posters and in-store staff and customer shots.
- A selfie is a good way to show your support for local celebrities – we got 250 likes when we posted a photo of local boxer Kell Brook wearing a The Singhs Team top along with Bal and Vrinder.
- Don’t advertise without a reward for your customer – run a competition instead.
- Community engagement posts work well. We posted a photo of a store-led litter pick we ran over the summer, which received 131 likes.
- Don’t share other people’s announcements and news links – it makes your page boring and impersonal and sends people away from your page. You have to keep content relevant to what you do.
- If you have won an award then share the certificate or trophy with your customers and post photos.
- Use Facebook to show your store’s support for national events.
- Posts can highlight a new service that the store is offering
TIMING
- Make sure you post your offers at appropriate times. For example, we post our sandwich meal deals at lunchtime. Plus, we have Ciroc vodka at every day low prices, but we highlight this on Thursday, Friday and Saturday when people are planning a night out – not on a Tuesday morning when it isn’t relevant.
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