How can you optimize your tea shop's social media strategy to be engaging and relevant? In this age of social media, merchants are provided with the luxury of data, a company-specific audience, and the ability to consistently connect with their customer base.

For starters, it is crucial to be mindful of the difference between promotional and engaging activities. In the past, marketing focused on incubating an awareness of specific products and services. Everyone was bombarded with alerts to buy new products, so in order to rise above the static your posts need to be uniquely personal to the consumer.

Let’s break down three key elements to incubating a successful social media strategy:

Consistency- Training your customer to expect content. A campaign that drove traffic featured a daily posting schedule including Mantra Monday, Tasting Note Tuesday, What Tea Wednesday, Tea Trivia Thursday, Free Tea Friday, ActiviTea Saturday, and New Sips Sunday. By creating consistency customers are more apt to expect activity on pages.

Story- Encourage customers to tell their stories about experiences in store. Many times, we feature real customers enjoying tea at the shop with clever captions. This can create a strong psychological effect as when folks see others enjoying the process it makes them want to take part.

Empowerment- Creating an in-store social media manager is empowering to your employee and makes them realize they have an active stake in the company’s success. Developing this position is often overlooked, yet will help ensure that you don't lose contact with your customer. Lastly make it fun, consider having a contest for the most successful posts utilizing data from your campaigns.

Measuring your impact. While it is thrilling to create new content, you want to regularly monitor data to ensure posts are engaging. Facebook, for example, offers three metrics that can really help you strategically improve content:

1. Reach- The amount of people who see your posts on their newsfeed. To increase reach, you need to increase the amount of people 'talking about this.’

2. Engaged users- The amount of people who click on a post.

3. Talking about this- The amount of people who like or comment on a given post.

By reviewing these metrics, you can get a clear idea of which content best works for your customer and business. Be sure to strategically devise and test various types of posts so you can delineate between styles that will drive your business.

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