Let’s be real. There is so much out there on how to manage and use social media for your business, but none of it explicitly address the use of social media in a bakery. We have taken the last several years of learning, studying, and doing and decided we would help our fellow bakery entrepreneurs by providing tips and techniques we use for our bakery business. To start help, we wanted to share with your the steps we use for scheduling Facebook and IG for your bakery business.
We hope by sharing with you our struggles and processes that we can inspire you to take care of your social media accounts for your bakery business.
Scheduling Facebook…
So we do not automate Facebook. It is one of our more active social networks. We do weekly lives and have people who actively follow and engage with us.
This is why we do not automate Facebook, but we do schedule our posts for Facebook. We have a business Facebook page versus a Facebook group.
Now, I have run Facebook groups and love them. If that is the route you want to go, then that is great. At least time, we do not get a big enough ROI on a group versus a page.
Either way, Facebook offers a scheduling tool for both Facebook groups and a Facebook business page. We use a consistent pattern to my Facebook posts which allows us to schedule our Facebook a month or two in advance.
If your content plan allows, you can do as far in advance as you want. We like to plan a month or two ahead and try to keep to a theme.
We post a recipe on Mondays. A tool or product we offer on Tuesdays. We go LIVE every Wednesday (If you are afraid to go LIVE, then watch our video about doing it scared [LINK].) Thursday, I post a “Did you know?” where we share tips to improve baking skills and baking knowledge. On Friday, we like to share a blog post. We don’t always schedule a post on Saturday and Sunday at this time.
We save these for more of an impromptu post, but we do sometimes schedule them. On these days, we keep it more personal. We might share what we are doing or ask a silly question. We try to find ways to engage and get to know our customers. All of these are quickly scheduled on Facebook monthly. Go and watch a quick tutorial on scheduling on Facebook if you do not already know how. [LINK]
Scheduling IG…
We have always been a little scared of Instagram because quite frankly we SUCK at taking pictures. We have been working hard to improve these skills, but we are still not there. That has made IG a challenge for us, but we have worked through processes to really start to grow our IG account.
Instagram use to not our biggest converter therefore we didn’t spend too much time currently it, but this has quickly started to change. IG has started converting more than our Facebook account.
Just like Facebook, we do plan our content out, but unlike our Pinterest and Twitter account, we do not have anything to automate that. We use a free trial of Hootsuite to schedule our IG posts. Hootsuite allows us to schedule 30 posts at a time. For our current IG strategy, we only posts 3 days a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Since Hootsuite gives you 30 posts that can be scheduled at a time, we sit down each month and schedule out the next month worth of content for Insta. We, also, keep a word document with our most common and top hashtags that we use. This allows the person scheduling IG to quickly choose what hashtags to use.
We suggest you use the IG app to do your hashtag research and then use a word document to save your favorite hashtags. Make sure you are using a 10-10-10 rule meaning that you use 10 narrow or niched hashtags, 10 that are broad, and 10 that are based on your location.
We have different categories for our hashtags based on our most common topics along with our fav hashtags to use for the holidays
This is what we do to schedule our Facebook and IG. We hope we have helped you with scheduling Facebook and IG for your bakery business.
How do you manage your Instagram? Leave a comment below or chat us up.
If you are looking for more baking business advice or tips, then check out our other blog articles. If you do not have time to sit and read blog posts, then we suggest you check out our YouTube channel or our podcasts. We offer more tips and advice on these two platforms. Check us out below:
Have questions about the process that we use for automating our Twitter account? We would love to hear from you. Leave us a comment below or hit us up on the chat, and we will help as best we can.
Ready to just give up social media for your bakery business? We have been there and done that. We have been researching, reading, practicing, and learning all so we can share with you, the best practices and strategies to use in your bakery business for social media. That we why we have created our course all about social media management for your bakery business. We want to give you the opportunity to harness the power of social media in your bakery business with the our course Bakery BS 101: Bakery Social Media.
If you want to learn more about understanding and growing your social media for your bakery business, then go and register for more information. [LINK]
