A Glasgow gift shop's honest, funny post about mask policies and capacity limits got strong engagement by being personal instead of corporate. The owner shared why she needed to limit visitors and tagged supplier brands to reach their audiences, proving that genuine communication builds customer trust.
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Today we're looking at how being personal on social media and truthful can drive more engagement. This is the Hellya Shop. They're a quirky gifting store based in Glasgow. Now, this piece of content comes directly from the owner of the store, as if she's talking to a friend. Now, the post itself is actually a Covid safety post and it got a huge amount of likes and engagement because the owner spoke from the heart. She was very honest and relatable. So let's take a look at it. Well, first of all, the image would capture your attention. As you can see, she's obviously wearing her mask and then she's got her funny little mascot, if you like, that's there. Definitely. If you were scrolling on past, you would certainly go in and have a look to see what she's saying. And then she goes into a lot of details. So she's talking as if she's talking to a friend. It's all very personable. She's talking about confusion. A few of the customers have asked about whether they were still to wear masks or not, and she's still saying that basically. Basically, she's giving all of the safety explanations for anybody that wants to come in and visit. So then. But she's being really personal about it and joking around about it. She's talking about, back in the day, they used to have 15 to 20 shop and now they've got in the shop, now she's got to keep it to three and she's saying, you know, that it is. It's just. It's really, really difficult. She owns a shop, so obviously the aim of the game is to make as much money as possible because she wants to retire early and live with her cats. So as much as it pains her to ask you to wait outside, she's going to ask. So again, it's talking about safety information and something to do with security and I guess quite a difficult subject. And she's making it jokey, she's making it fun and very much on brand with who she is. And then people have commented underneath, saying, you know, excellent bit of informative common sense and, you know, like, people really, really understand it and I think it's lovely. And there's so many different ways that people have done this over the last couple of years and obviously, as you know, we continue over the next few years, there'll always be something that you've got to communicate, whether it's a security measure or whether, you know, you've got different store layout or whether, you know something's happening, there might be building works, it doesn't matter. But as long as you communicate it from the heart and be honest and relatable, people will really buy into that. And then the other thing to mention is that she also likes to mention other small businesses that they stock throughout all of her posts, which gives further opportunity for customers to support and shop local. If I was her, I would have also maybe tagged them in this post as well. So that then they can sort of spread the word, if you like, through their networks because anybody that's looking for that specific gift, who knows it's not there then, but they might not follow the Hellya shop, they might only follow the individual brand. So again, it's just an extra way of spreading the words. Now, if I was the hellier shop and because obviously she stocks lots of different products and brands, what I might want to do is to make sure that I support them. I would go into engagement and I would go into engage on the maybe platform and what I would do is I would create a little group of all of the products and businesses that I stock in my business. I've created a little group so you can literally add them here and then what you do is, so say it was, I don't know, all candle products. So say you've got four different types of candle products. They would then come up here on each of the four businesses and then you would click them and then what that would do is it would bring up all, all of the candle products, social media accounts, their live feeds would be here, or, sorry, their latest posts would be here even. And then what you would do is you would like, you would comment, you would engage and it just means that then, you know, you can see their, their products, they can see that you're supporting them and they're more likely to support you back as well. Now, if you've got any questions whatsoever, click on the little blue button. We love to help.
