Bira August Webinar - Maybe* helps businesses get more out of social media

Good morning, everybody. I hope that you're all well, I'll let you all start trickling in, give you a second to get yourselves sorted and I will be right with you to talk all things social media. I hope you're all doing really well this morning. It is a very beautiful, sunny morning in Buckinghamshire. I would absolutely love to hear where you're all from today. So feel free to add into the Q and A, let me know where you're from, what type of businesses you are, because actually that really helps me in terms of helping shape some of the content that we talk about today because I always give real life examples of how you as a business could tailor what we've seen for years. So again, yeah, please let me know what type of business you run. My name is Donna Callender and we basically I work with maybe to help businesses get more out of social media. We know that social media is really hard and we make it easy by taking the guesswork out of getting real results. So that's what we're doing here. Today's webinar webinar is sponsored by Byra, which is exciting. So thanks very much and we, I think are welcoming quite a lot of businesses from pool today as well. So it's nice to have you guys here. But yeah, as I say, let me know where you're from, your businesses and I will have a look through the Q and A as we go and see if I can help tailor it as much as I can so you get as much out of it for those who are on here live. So bit of an intro about me if you've not been on here before. My name's Donna Callender, I'm an experienced marketeer. I have in the retail sector for way too long and I have worked as. Basically started off my career as a marketing administrator in a really tiny shopping center up in Edinburgh, right through to working in some of the largest shopping centers with some of the largest retailers in the UK as marketing manager and then I've been marketing head of marketing across 35 shopping centers, working with lots of different types of businesses and then for the last few years I have run my own marketing agency where so I completely understand understand what it's like to physically be on one side of the till and then be on the other where you're directing a business. So I completely get it. And then this, the last few years I've also spent a lot of hours every single week training lots of small businesses on how to do exactly this. So how to get more out of social media. And every week you'll see me on partner with maybe where we effectively look at lots of different examples of where businesses are doing really, really well on social. And then I break it down and then look at how that could work for anybody as big, say, a place right through to a tiny independent, I don't know, you know, Baker, for example. So we do this because only 19% of the UK and US businesses have an active social media presence. And in contrast, 82% of consumers see social media influences their lifestyle, purchasing decisions. So that is a big, big, big gap. And what we try and do every single week when we come on here and through all the other things that we do is to try and bridge that gap, because we know that actually there's a huge amount of it that comes. You don't have enough time, you feel that you don't know what content to use, you're not quite sure which channel to use. So those are a lot of the areas that we focus on. So hold on to your hats and sort of be ready for some really good examples today. And how I'm going to get started is by talking about the fastest way to grow your social media and get into a bit of a rhythm is actually to join in conversations, because National Days are effectively, and forgive me if you guys understand this already, but there might be people on here who don't. So National Day is effectively, I've put a couple here that are really big conversations at the moment, but basically it is a topic. So you have everything from National Dog Day through to a huge one like Black Business Month, so celebrating black businesses all across the UK and indeed beyond. And it gives people an area of focus. So it gives you an area of focus. So whether it's Independent Retailer Month, it might be Book Lovers Day, it might be National Dog Day, it might be something as simple as it's National Donut Day or something like that. It's a hook. It's a reason to talk to a certain demographic or certain type of people who particularly like a thing and get the topic of conversation going. And if there's lots of conversation going on, it's all together in one hashtag, sometimes multiple, but most of the time one. And then basically by using that hashtag and engaging, AKA liking, commenting, sharing within that hashtag, you're going to get more reach, it is going to attract more of the right people to your, say, your Instagram account and you're going to get more out of it. Facebook as well, Twitter as well, obviously, it's how it all works. But specifically here we're going to focus a little bit on Instagram. So just before I do, I'm just going to find out where you guys are from. So. Hi, Harriet, you're from Hereford. Lovely, nice to have you here. Philip Morrison, son, retail sector. Karen from Waddington High street pet shop and online store. Fantastic. And then got Claire, independent menswear retail business based in Leicestershire, Warwickshire border. Brilliant. Really lovely to have you guys on. So I will remember these when we're talk. So lots of physical retail, which is brilliant, as well as a bit of online. That's great. So thank you. Right, so we're going to get started. And the reason why I've chosen these at the moment is because they are big conversations that are happening now. So they're happening in sort of August, right through to the end of August. So these are good opportunities for you to get involved in a conversation. And if you're immediately looking at going, that doesn't really resonate with me. I'm a menswear business, you know, something like that. You know, I'm a pet shop. Why would that, I mean dog day should do. But the other ones, why would that resonate with me? Well, this is exactly why we're here and what's, what we're going to look at today. So we're going to start with a big, big, big, big, big topic, Black Business Month. So Black History Month is one of the biggest topics at all when it comes to social media and when it indeed general media, it's something that gets everybody talking about all of the real life issues. Black Business Month is similar in that it gets people talking about issues, but it actually is about celebration. It is about shining the spotlight on businesses who are run by, who are run by black people, by black ownership. If this might be a family, it might be that actually it is a business that celebrates black history. It might be something to do with a culture. So it's all around that area basically. But ultimately it is about bringing together people to celebrate a thing. And this happens to be the thing. So Black History Month this so far. So the whole of this month is Black History Month, sorry, Black Business Month even. And in here we've got 74,288 posts. So when you go into a hashtag, again, if you know this already, apologies, but for anyone that doesn't the when you're going to hit a hashtag, it is collating a topic of conversation. So anybody who's using this hashtag will have something to say about this topic, which is amazing. You go in there. So we're already on. What are we on the 9th of August, and there is 74,000 posts about this already. The whole month is the celebration of Black Business Month. Therefore you have another, you know, rest of the month to get involved in this conversation in any way, shape or form. So here you can see lots of different what you get when you go into a hashtag, unless once you follow it, it basically starts collating all of the top, most engaged content for you. So if you start following it, you'll getting all the most engaged content, which is great. But when you go in, you immediately see these top posts. So I want to do is show you how different businesses are using the topic of conversation to engage with people. So here we have a competition. So this is actually a company that's based over in Atlanta, Georgia, but there's no reason why we can't take something from it here in the uk. So here, just do right by people because karma don't play fair. And then you've got the competition and basically it's all kind of there. So, like, I basically absolutely love this. So this is basically them pulling together. What would I call it? Basically a collection or an outfit. Yeah, so it's a collection. And you've got the handbag, you've got the, you've got the amazing shoes, you've got the glasses, you've got the Lauryn Hill quote on the, on the jumper, you've got the jeans, you've got the glasses. So it is one big beautiful bundle of. This is what, you know, this is what we're celebrating here right now, using this hashtag. So what we're doing is celebrating Lauryn Hill, we're celebrating culture, we're celebrating fashion, and it's pulling everything together all at once. So this got them a lot of engagement. This was only put up 20 hours ago. And as I said, if they turn this into a competition, then what you could do is do a win this bundle. So how I would do this if I was you guys and thinking about, you know, if you want to get involved in this conversation or indeed any other conversation, but it's looking at how you pull together a bundle is it's essentially taking all the images, putting it all together, or you can do a flat lay. So literally getting a white sheet of paper or something, or colored sheet paper, orange, green, whatever you, your brand colors are putting lots of items together that all match. So say you're the menswear retailer that's on here, just now putting all the items together that match. You can pop that on there one day to say amazing capsule wardrobe for this weekend. And it might relate back to say the topic of conversation. Then the next day you could do a competition to win it. So it's that kind of teasing people to show what you've got and this is your collection and then engaging them again with a competition. And competitions always engage. So when I saw this I immediately thought competition went into it went oh, basically it's an amazing wardrobe. So I would then be interested in knowing lots of things about this. I would want to know the prices. So again a lot of people would have here put down in the bullet points the prices. It might be that you see something like link in the bio. It might be that you then have a little video of someone wearing the outfit for example or indeed talking about why you chose that outfit. So there's lots of different ways of doing it. But effectively, if this is one of the most engaged posts in this hashtag in the last 20 hours, that's showing you that this is starting to gather, it's starting to get more reach. It started to get engagement and it is because of the different hashtags that have been used. So then we go a little bit further down. So this slightly different. Here we go. Okay, so here you've got people having an absolutely. Oh my goodness, that meal looks incredible. Whenever we do this at 10 o' clock, it always makes me so hungry. The cocktails look bang on. The music, the feel of it, it looks amazing. That is someone that's had a really blooming good time enjoying themselves out on a night out. So here this is them saying we had a time and we tried to plan out every other month or so to enjoy friendship, good hugs, loving energy, laughter, etc. July did not disappoint. We did all of the above plus celebrated birthdays. And then they started tagging in. So it's a black owned restaurant and so the tag them and they've tagged in the bands. So they've gone in the find out the names of all the bands and the vocalists etc. They have put down then the other bands here they have put down the bartender which is fab, great idea. And then they've even put in the chef as well. And then they've said make sure to add this place to your list of black owned restaurants to try in the DMV area and be sure to follow the artists in the band. And then as you seen that you've got black business Month, Black business, black black entrepreneurs, black owned business, black owned restaurant, black chefs. So they've got basically all of the different because it's obviously all based around like leisure food, all that kind of thing. So they've got all the different hashtags that people would be following around, say Black Business Month. But then they've focused it on celebrating Black Business Month by tagging everybody in. So I think what I would take from this is if you are an independent business and you want to drive footfall, one of the best ways of doing it is tagging. So use the tagging function. This is a brilliant way of doing it. So whether this is user generated content, so this is obviously you know the custom like a customer side or it is yourself that is doing it, is making sure if your team are willing to and they're comfortable with it, tag in your team on, on Instagram, make sure that you are tagging in. If you've got a live band on or something like that, tag them in. If you are, see our pet shop supplier who's on here today and make sure that you're tagging in the different brands that you've got available. Especially ones if you're doing like a, you know, an event or like that, make sure that you're tagging them in, making sure as well that anyone who's tagged you in, making sure that you are then reusing that content as well. So it's just another way of making sure that you're getting extra reach. So you're going to get it through the. Basically the hashtags are how people find you because you click on it like I've done here. And then even the ones I looked at yesterday aren't even coming up in the top posts. So I'm looking at these completely brand new as well. But that's exactly what the point is, is that I'm going to be keep delivered brand content. They're all coming in and then what I'm looking at is okay, how can I tailor that for my business? What ideas can I get from that? So remember looking at these, I as a customer I'm going to have followed this and gone right. Okay, this is interesting. I want to find some, say I want to support Black Black Business Month. Great. Then I want to find businesses in my area, which is why the hashtags are so important. So it might be hashtag Black Business Month, hashtag pool business, hashtag a black business in pool. It might be there'll be smaller hashtags obviously in comparison to that one. So again, your content will come up a lot quicker in that one. But it does mean that you've got a pool, if you like, of people in an area that are looking to support people, looking to support people using that hashtag. So do you see what I'm saying? It's that kind of. You can be found through the hashtags, but then by tagging you get more reach because anyone that's tagged all of their followers will then, once they share it, will then start seeing your pose and then they're much more likely to follow you. So that's the function of tagging. So massive, massive topic of conversation that was, that was at 73, is now pretty much 74. So get involved with it. Like, as you can see, I took that screenshot yesterday and it's already completely different content that's there and it will continue to be different content on there. There was loads of competitions, there was loads of people talking about products. There's loads of people talking about, like from a culture perspect, why it's really important for them to talk about the trials and tribulations of running a business and loads of amazing, amazing content. So just make sure that you get involved in there and start having a look. If it's something that resonates with you, just have a look and see if there's anything in the Q and A. Hi, Andy from Planters Brookfield Garden Centre. Hello, Courtney from Chichester. We've got independent menswear, a couple of menswears. I would just like to focus on customers in my local area rather than further afield. Do national days potentially tap into all UK based customers? The answer to that, Karen, is yes. So as you've just kind of seen, lots of the content that I pulled in from that yesterday was actually UK based. And what's just come up is US based. And that's literally just because again, it'll be time zones and when people are posting and that kind of thing. So when you're thinking about it from that perspective, the national days almost is more of a theme and then the hashtags you use pull it around your area. So if it was me and I wanted to do something to do with say, Black Business Month, but I'm based in. Where were you based? I think you said Karen. So I'll go with West Sussex, for example, then I would be using that as something to talk about. So it might be that it's part of Black Business Month. I want to celebrate the fact that, that we run a, a black business that focuses on black culture. It might be food, it might be books, it might be history, or it might just be the business owners and they just want to talk about, you know, their journey being business owners. So whatever it might be, that is, that just gives me food for thought and I go, right, okay, I can theme my content around that big national hashtag, the same as what you would might do for any of the other ones. It might be. It might be more around females or it might be more around mums, for example. You theme it around that topic. But yes, you're right, anyone can then get involved in your conversation and that's not going to drive footfall, but it will drive reach on Instagram. And then the local hashtags is how you then get found locally. And it's by doing things like tagging in your. Your place. So it would be tagging in that you're in West Sussex or tagging in that you're in Chichester or indeed Leicestershire, Warwickshire, places like that. They've all got amazing hashtags. So it'd be hashtag Bordeaux business hashtag. You know, there's ones really good ones for the, say, Northampton, Northampton Shire, things like that. So use the local ones to drive the local conversation to drive. That's the physical footfall. And then you can use the national ones to actually create the content. So hopefully that makes sense. It's that kind of giving you a reason to talk. And then, sorry, we've got electrical and tool fixing, so wholesale company Tomo Haya, and then we've got Alana from Lincolnshire, an independent furniture and bed retailer. Brilliant. Hi, Alana. And then, sorry, just another one before we carry on. If a company I stock the product of, then I tag in, does that direct our customer to a direct sale with the manufacturer, who also sell online? Totally understand that. No. So if you tag them in, yes, of course, they could technically go in and then go and have a look at the supplier, but there is going to be fairly minimal. It is much more around driving reach because it's much more likely that if they are, if you stock their product, then either way they want the sale. So they're more likely to still share the fact that you have engaged with them. Either way, Instagram likes the fact that you've tagged in someone else. So the more that people engage with your post, the more Instagram goes, oh, people like this content. We're going to keep showing people this content. So I would focus less on worrying about, say, one customer sale. It's more actually about, basically, it's beating The Instagram algorithm, it's going, right, okay, I want more people to see this so you can tag them. But equally, if it is something you're worried about and it's something with your products, then think more about other things. It might be. Might be your team, it might be other suppliers that you work with locally, or it might be suppliers that you work with or with products that don't do the direct sale through Instagram or something like that. So there might be other ways of doing it if that is something that you are particularly worried about. And. Hi, Charlotte as well. Right, I'm gonna move on and then, yeah, anybody else, please feel free to pop it in the chat there. So we're now going to talk about Book Lovers Day. Book Lovers Day is coming up and it's already had 192,000, in fact. Well, basically it's at 193, hasn't it? 193,000 people posting about it. That is massive. Now, Book Lovers Day is absolutely huge. And I don't care whether you are what we got. We've got DIY on here, we've got electrical goods. I mean, yeah, maybe a slight stretch, but you could do it. If you are a particular book lover, you never know. Or whether you are a place, or whether you are, you know, a really small independent cafe, for example, quite literally menswear retailer, another massive one. Any of you guys could use this as a topic because guess what, what you've got to think about is whether or not you're a book lover or not. People are. People like to talk about what the bread, what they've, you know, had in their ears. People like to talk about, you know, you know, like, I mean, I'm constantly on social media particularly. I've got loads of friends that sit there and, you know, they've read. Their goal this year is to read a book a month, that kind of thing. There's lots of book clubs, there's lots of people talking about particular books that are coming in. It's a topic of conversation. Equally, if you're aimed at children, another big topic of conversation is everything's all about getting literacy levels up and children reading and all that kind of stuff. So think about it as that. So don't. Don't just look at the topic and go, oh, I can't talk about that. Actually, if there's 192,000 posts about that, of course you can get involved in the conversation, but it's how you get involved in the conversation. So let's take a look at something like this, right? So this is brand new. Literally just come up, up. So Eve's book nook. So clearly this is the, you know, she's got a reason to be celebrating this. So today is National Book Lovers Day. Like, we need a reason to celebrate books, but it's a great excuse to celebrate the books that I love, including appropriately, Book Lovers by Emily Harriet. What's your favorite books? Now, the reason why this is a good one to show you guys is because this is personal. So this is coming from a personal perspective. These are her favorite books. No one else's favorite books. These are hers. When you show people your favorite films, your favorite music, your favorite books, so again, you can theme it around, you know, like, like there's National Metal Day. There's national, you know, like, depends on obviously what you're into. Theme it around that and then show the personal side to your business because it's really, really important as an independent business owner. People buy from people. So if you're never actually talking in any way from a personal perspective, we're not going to get to know you. And trust me when I say I literally sat on a call yesterday looking at stats for Christmas for 2023, looking at people's purchasing decisions and why. And there's a massive percentage. I think it was something like I'd have to go back and double check this. So I will, and I'll post it on LinkedIn or something like that, but I have to go back and check it. But there was a massive percentage of people who still, even, you know, the, we've gone through the pandemic, we've gone through lockdown, who say the people behind the business is hugely important to the reason why they want to support it. And the independent businesses are, I think it was something like still 35% of people were still really interested in only supporting independent businesses over the over and the sort of Christmas period. So that's just from that one poll. Think about everybody else. So people buy from people. I've immediately gone, right, okay, you know, I might like that one. Don't like that one. Ooh, what's that one? But the other thing from a social media perspective, always ask people's opinions, always. So whether you're tomo and you've got maybe you focus more on sort of Facebook because actually I imagine and what you do, and I've worked with some wholesalers and things before, you'll get more recommendations to Facebooks and like, you know, some of the communities and things like that. So on somewhere like that. Then if you were asking questions like, I don't. It could be something about something personal, or it might literally be, you know, that what's the, you know, what's the best experience you've had with this particular product? People love giving opinions. People especially love giving opinions on social media because it's faceless. You might ask me something directly to, to your face. I might not give you the same response to what I would give you on social media. So the reason why you ask that is for two things. So it might be something simple. What's your favorite book? Look, what's your favorite color? What's, you know, showing two different pairs of menswear shoes and saying, what's your favorite. Trust me, when I say, when you do it, people will give their opinion. And you don't have to give them away. You don't have to do a competition. You don't have to do anything like that. People do it because they've gone, oh, yeah, that, yeah, I love red or I love blue or I love green or whatever. Now that gives me lots of things. It gives me extra engagement on my post because lots of people have engaged with it. It gives me, it gives me a reason to go back to people because I can rep lieback. So it opens up a conversation with people. And then guess what if lots and lots of people have said the same thing. So it might be a book, it might be a piece of music, it might be a film, it might be a character. Might be. What's your favorite Beyonce song? Whatever you like. It might be about an electrical product, whatever that might be. I literally have then all of these people that have given me an answer to something, so I now know what they all want, and I can give them more of that content equally. The other thing you can do with that is go, go. Oh, that's really interesting. 80% of my customers really liked this green product over this blue product. It might be dog harnesses, for example, where we've got. I know we've got a pet shop on today. I can then go, right, this is the underdog. Why is this the underdog? So that can either give me two things, right? Okay, not going to sell many of that, or actually, how do I position that better to people and start talking about it more? Do you see what I mean? So that is why something like this. So it might be about book lovers, but you can take that and turn it into any other topic. So it's just, this is the idea behind doing this webinar is to Give you guys some ideas on what you might choose to do. So then of course you've got something obviously like you've got the kids here which of course it's obviously all around kids. So today on the occasion of book lovers they are young artists celebrate the joy of reading with art as they create enchanting cover pages that bring stories to life. Now this might be if you have more of a place where you, you know it might be a cafe or something like that, you know you've got kids there or it might be that you've got an area somewhere or indeed you have something that you do with children maybe that's more mindful, anything like that. If you do arts and crafts, anything use the national days, we've got a list of them all on maybe use the national days to think well actually what can I do for kids? What can we do to entertain them? For example shopping centers literally could just put out some book covers today on a sheet of paper that they've printed off for free online. Stick them all out in the middle of their event area with some crayons and the kids will have a field day. I've got a five year old, I understand this. This is how you entertain them so that the grown ups can do things. So think about book lovers day and those kind of things like that that gives you a topic to go right, okay, what can I do physically in my store today? Equally you could, you could use it as an opportunity for it to engage your staff to get all of your staff talking about, talking about their own favorite books for example, something like that. This was really cute actually I quite liked. I couldn't help shading this photo and they've tagged in books more than stories to carry shape the speaked and and they speak to who we are as people. I'm going to celebrate today by cleaning my book piles and starting a new non work related book. What about you? Maybe we should all visit a local bookstore and buy a book. So again if you've got a local bookshop, something like that, use it as an opportunity to celebrate them, tag them in, pop in there, do a collaboration things like that. It just. Do you see what I mean? There's just so many different opportunities to do it. People have absolutely loved that as well. It's really really sweet and of course the image obviously makes you interested in it anyway so that's just again some ideas on, on what you can do around. I mean that's a really specific topic rather than a broad month long topic that is A day. And then finally, oh, we've got my favorite. It's National Dog Day. I've got a dog currently who's sniffing at me at the moment. And everyone loves a dog. Social media loves a dog. And this has had 9 million posts. 9 million posts, right? So bear that in mind. I'm not saying you need to start going in and engaging in this post, right? What I would do is use this as a way of talking about a topic. Now, there's different ways to do this, right? I mean, I. I can sit and show you all these like super cute little dogs and I mean, they're lovely. But I will show you a couple because I have to. But the idea behind this is this is a window. This is social media window. If you think about the topics of conversation we've just talked about, they are big topics, especially Black Business Month. This has had 9 million because. Because people love posting about pets. They love posting about dogs, their cats. It was National Cat Day, I think it was yesterday, or love your cat day or something like that. My LinkedIn was full of cats. And I remember going, why is that? And then going, of course it's because of that. And it was a mix because it was on LinkedIn. Everybody was focused, it was all around their business. So think about that. If you have anything to do with dogs. But we've got a pet shop here. Anything to do with dogs. If you're not using this as a topic conversation, please do. I literally yesterday on Instagram, bought a little. She got a D shedder for my dog. And the reason why is because I was looking at this hashtag. Instagram knew. I looked at this hashtag. It served me up an ad by a company who then. And the ad was for. It was, as I said, it was for. I think it was for a harness, actually. It's for a harness. And I remember going, that's quite cute. Clicked on it. Then I saw the D shedder. I went, oh, oh, Bucky, my dog really needs that. So I then had gone from looking at this hashtag to being served an ad to then liking their content to then going into their shop and then purchasing. And I'd say I did that within the space of 20 minutes. So if I, as, you know, basically as a consumer, have done that equally as a social media person who, you know, sits and does this day in and day out, and I knew exactly how that had worked and I still bought it. That's why to do it. This is exactly why you engage in these hashtags and you use these hashtags. So either use it as content, inspiration or use it as a way of going, right, I can funnel more of the right people into me and start bringing it like that. So, I mean, we'll take a little look. This one is brand new, so this is. Ever wondered how soft a greyhound feels? Super cute. Interested in adopting or supporting gpa, but don't know where to start. Or maybe you just want to pet some dogs because it makes you happy and we get it. Join us on August 26th for a meet and greet at the Headstrong Hound. And then they've given all the details about what times they're going to be there. Some owners of greyhounds for the event, they'll be able to stop you and say, hello, National Dog Day. And then they've talked about adopt, don't shop, etc. So why this is so important is it's exactly this. So it could be that you work with a local charity for that day, it could be you bring your dog into Work Day, but actually you could do a little event. I've seen, literally shopping centres do doggy fashion shows. I mean, all out. Or it could be that actually you allow dogs into your business. So it could just genuinely be. Did you know that we're dog friendly? And take a picture of the dog bowl. So use it as an idea to promote it. I know a business that I worked with recently who sell hire equipment. So they do hiring equipment for things like scaffolding and for something like National Dog Day, they've gone nuts for it because they've got a dog. One of the guys in their work brings in the dog every day and he's got more followers and more engagement than they do. And that's fine because guess what? It brings people, it brings topics of conversation. So that's why something like National Dog Day can be so important. And then, of course it is. It's, you know, very like cute little ones. This week my parents took me to Disney Springs, but it was so hot I asked them for a tasty puppuccino from Starbucks. So as you can see, this is a Shih Tzu that has his. Has 46,000 followers. So another way to look at how you could celebrate Dog Day in particular, we've got our pet supplier on here today is by looking for a local dog who has an account. I know one of my clients has an Instagram account for their dog and they post on every single day and loads of local businesses love it. So local groomers like to use them. They're kind of like many influencers without being influencers, if you like. So that could be another idea for you. But to be fair, I actually think it's just a really good opportunity to show your very, very cute little dog. And I mean, look at that. Okay. I mean, that is as simple as anything. Literally then playing with basically a kid's toy. So there's ways of making it funny, ways of making it clever, there's ways of using it as just as a hashtag, and then there's ways of using it just to generate some content around something in your business. So make sure if you have anything to do with dogs or you love dogs, just talk about it. It could be as simple as you have dog biscuits, you know, like at your tail. It might be something as simple as that. But make sure you talk about it because lots of my local cafes do. Okay, before we go on, I'm just going to check and see if I've got any more questions that we've talked about. Charlotte, for reading DIY Shop Up. Okay, Mary, we only have a Facebook page so far. Is there any limitations on setting up a business Instagram page? Is it easy? You're a hardware retailer in northeast. Oh, got a few hardware DIY shops on today. That's really interesting. That's. I'm going to write that down because it means we can deliver. We probably need to look at delivering you guys more content and more content ideas. So, no, it is really, really simple as the answer to set up an Instagram page, it takes you two minutes. It's more after that. It's how you then run it, if that makes any sense. So you can quite literally go on to Instagram and create your account and then it. You can link it directly to your Facebook page. So anything from your Facebook page, you can post directly to Instagram if you want to. If you don't want to start worrying about content and vice versa. But you need to make sure there's options for setting up as a business page or personal page. You just need to set it up as a business page. But if you come on in, if you go into maybe and you go into. There's a little blue button at the bottom of the of your maybe platform. If you click in there, you will see all the training sessions equally. There's book training at the top. And I think we do it, we do it on a Tuesday. And it's literally how to set up. It's. So we come on like this and we just say we're open. What do you need help with. And it could be that you're already on Instagram, you want to learn how to do a reel, or it might be that you have a Facebook page and you're not quite sure what to do with, you know, I don't know, your bio, something like go on and book in direct training because honestly we'll help you on the day and if you've got any questions, we've also got set little video trainings on how to do all of it. I'll go into the cat Elgin and I'll show you quickly in a second where that is in the platform, just in case you want it. But honestly we'll help you physically do it for you, so you don't need to worry about it. I hope that helps. So this is the platform, this is exactly what we're talking about. So we help you guys do this. So, so up here at the top is where you can, as I was saying, book training. So just log in, click on the book training. And then as I said, there's like we're here Monday to Friday, so every day at 10 o'. Clock. So on a Monday it is how to use. Maybe on a Tuesday it is quite literally you know, what to do on social media, how to do a thing. Wednesday you've got May with lots of case studies and then Thursday, Friday are dedicated to ads. So Thursday is how to actually run an ad, you know, campaign from scratch and then Friday is how to how to get better at ads. So honestly, we've helped businesses scale and get, you know, like 10 grands worth of sales off the back of like a really short space of time just using an ad and it's just helping them come up with the campaign and the metric and helping build their audience, etc. But if you literally are not even sure how to put on Instagram, please come on and we'll help you do. Honestly, there's no, there's no silly question or anything like that. We're so used to people like, you know, her familiar with one channel and not another one. So it's fine. As you can see, everything's on your dashboard. Content, that is, you can schedule in your content here or you can go in and check what contents in there being scheduled, you can reply back to people commenting on your posts across every single channel. So instead of going between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you know, whatever, and they're all in one place, so I can literally just go through, I make it one of my weekly tasks for myself and each of my clients. I go in and we just go in and reply back to everybody so that everyone gets a reply. Then there's everybody who's mentioned you. So AKA any of the people that have tagged you, if you've missed them, just because you know you're all busy business owners, then you just go in there and you can reply back to them there and engage. So if that is basically that tells me it gives me all of the content from anybody who's ever talked about me before. So it might be a local business, it might be a supplier, it might be a customer has talked about me. If they've put up new content, I can go in there and engage with it. And that's what keeps conversation going and it keeps, keeps your, the algorithm going. And as you can see, you can obviously compare yourself so you've got your best post on the left hand side and compare yourself to literally any other competitor on your bite there you've got all of the, all of the graphs. So that is quite literally like us pulling together all the information that you might need to know and helping make it super simple for you. So these are all your used hashtags, so it helps you understand. Okay, well which ones am I using and which ones are actually driving people to me me? You can see who's got influence in your conversation by influencer. As I said, it could literally be the, I don't know, the local dog influencer right through to one of your suppliers or it might be one of your members of the team. You see what's been said about you. So this is really helpful. It pulls together all of the key keywords, if you like, that people are saying about you. So again, if I was talking about a particular product, like I said, that company yesterday got me on talking about a dog Harmony harness and I was like, kind of, you know, interested, but wonder what else they do. And then it got me into something else. So if they're really pushing out the dog harness, I would expect people to be talking about that dog harness, if that makes any sense. You can also see how people feel about you. You can see your reach, etc, and then there's this, this is the absolute gold dust. So this is your ads. So this is basically what we helped this lady do. She's an independent business owner and based on. And she does, she called Longho, sorry. And what she does is she's female fashion. So she comes on to Instagram, for example, and she walks around showing off a beautiful product, talks about how it fits, etc. And then we helped her create ad campaigns. And as you can see, literally she had the conversion value of ten and a half thousand pounds. And that is quite literally just through working on this, creating an algorithm that works and then working on it. And then we've got training, so please feel free to go on in the training. So in here, on that little training, you don't have to come on live. If that's not something you've got time for on a 10 o' clock on a, you know, on a weekday, then you can go in here and you can see it. So this is how everything from how to use Instagram to how to set up Google business profile, etc. It's all in there. And then we've got this. So this is your content calendar. So I actually was looking at businesses in pool yesterday and just to kind of look at. Because basically I like to kind of choose a place and have a little look and see, you know, the top businesses. And one of the top businesses that came up, so they're called, let me just refresh myself. So they are called S Bomb Vintage Workshop and they came up top Trumps every single time I looked at po. And the reason why is because, well, they were actually seen on BBC2 at one point. But basically they are. They do their coffee shop events and apparel and they specialize in custom motorbikes. So it's a very niche audience. But they're getting a huge amount of engagement on social media. And I was able to literally without, you know, them being on the platform, I was able to go in, add them myself and look at their content calendar. So this is literally their content calendar for last week. I can see that they focus mainly on Facebook and Instagram. I can see that they post the same stuff on Instagram and Facebook and I'm able to go into it and see what time they post, how often they post, post what kind of content they post, that kind of thing. And that is the best way of being able to get an understanding of how one of your competitors is doing. Just add them into the content calendar. And then once you're in there, I can then use the AI system and I'll go into this in a second, but I can use the AI system to be able to go in there and I can ask for, can you give me a list of all the national days that are coming up? And it will literally write my content for me. So here it told me that it was national, national, you know, Children's Gardening Week. And then it will write a content so I can Literally copy and paste any of those if it's something that is interesting to me in my business. So as we go in here, what I wanted to do is actually go in and show you guys what I mean. So I'm just gonna go a bit rogue and go onto the platform separately because I've got it all set up. Here we go. So this is. This is me in the maybe account and this is the business that I just showed you. This is S BOM Vintage Workshop based in Pool. And this is their content for last week. So you can see they only posted on Sunday and they only focused and they only posted on Thursday. Now I might, as a local business go, actually that's quite good. It might actually even be a supplier, for example. Maybe a supplier's done a really good post, they've got a really good image and I think, great, you know what? I want to do something with that. So I can take that post, I can either view it or I can choose to duplicate it. So I can, if I want to support another business or indeed one of my suppliers or indeed one of my customers, you know, I can basically redo the content like this. So I can go in here whilst that's doing it. I'm just going to have a look and see what other questions we've got over here in case there's anything. Right, I'll come back to you guys in a second. Now that this is loading, a few more questions. I promise I'll come back to you guys. Karen? Yes. I will come back to you as well. So this will just take a little second, guys, because we are on zoom and sometimes it takes a wee minute. Right, so I've just seen someone else's content. I've gone. I would quite like to recreate that content for myself. It might even be that you've got a local event going on within. It's from your account council website, you know, so your council Instagram and the same. You can do this on Facebook and Twitter, etc. So this, I want this to be on my maybe Instagram channel and this still has their content, so it's got their image there. So it says, watching the morning swimmers drink the best coffee at our kiosk. Okay, now I might want to change that because actually that might not be something that resonates with me. So I might want to be. Something like, tell me the best, The most loved coffee. In the uk, because that might then give me something to talk about. You know, this is my coffee, I'm talking about coffee, etcetera, so then I might use AI and then I'm going to ask that to write me a nice Instagram post about something like that. So that's given me the idea. So it'll say the most loved coffee in the UK is hashtag coffee, obviously. And we love it so much we can't get enough of it. And so that might do that. And then I might. It's also giving me some hashtags as well. So we'll ignore those for now. I'm going to move them. And then, so that's given me a little idea. And then I'll go, go. Our top faves are X, Y, Z. You can even, you know, put in the blends, for example. You can again think about menswear, think about your DIY products, think about any of those things. You might have seen a post somewhere. You can duplicate it equally. You might want to start a complete post from scratch and write something yourself. The AI system literally does it for you. And then I want that to be changed into something funny again. Bear in mind that this, this is learning. So it's learning from. So here it's giving me the top faves. So we love it so much we can't get enough. It's giving me my top faves as Starbucks Costa Nero. I don't want to talk about them, I want to talk about something else. So it gives you ideas and then what we, what you do is you kind of like tweak it from there and equally then you can see it there. You can see it as a grid preview. You can see, see what it's going to look like on your Instagram. You can tag in products through it. You can add your location that goes back to that location thing. That's really, really important as well. And then I might say, you know what, I actually want to change that and copy and paste it and do something on Facebook. So you can also do that. And it equally, it changes everything into oh, I've not said emojis. And it changes it into say, summarize. So you can take it from a long form social post. So you might have stole. You might be a blog, for example. You're like, oh, I want to steal that. I want to. And I say steal loosely. It's not stealing. As long as you tag in the business or the person that's posted, it's fine. But I might want to take a really long blog, literally copy and paste it in here, click here, and then it changes the whole thing and it will turn it into a Small Facebook post or a small tweet or a small Instagram post and then your job is just to tweak it to make sure it sounds like you. So I can literally look at someone else's content, think that looks really great, my customers will really resonate with that and then turn it into something for myself self. So. Here we go, just back to the slideshow. So whilst we're going to this engage locally, so I'm just going to come back to some of you guys. So Harriet, I've got great reach on Facebook but low reactions and the opposite on Instagram. How do I level up? Right, so this happens very often and if I'm being honest, it can be just depends. I can't remember. Did you see which business you were in, Harriet? Depends on your business because it might be that actually your. That's where your customers are. So Instagram sometimes for some businesses is literally a shop window. That's what it is. It is where people are because people kind of expect to just sit through your products and have a little look, but they don't really want to do anything with you on their Facebook is where they might want to talk to you equally it is that you might be just posting the same content on Facebook and Instagram and actually you've got a different customer on there. Instagram is different. You have to work so much harder to get people to say something on Instagram. Facebook is where people converse. People are used to moaning on there, they're used to celebrating on there, they're used to recommending on there. It's where people go to have a conversation. I'm literally looked at an event that's happening this week, weekend in my local thing. It's got a thousand people all talking at once and it's everything from recommending, which I don't know, you know, bars you should be going to, right through to what the kids activities are going to be and everyone's replying and everyone's. You do not get that with Instagram. Instagram is all about image or video to capture my attention. Then I get in it to get me to comment. It has to be something that is taggable, AKA that really made me laugh and I want to tag in a friend or it is something like a competition is going to make me want to comment and get involved in it or it needs to be something that I call it hitting people in the funnies or hitting them in the fields. Something that is emotive. So I've looked at it, laughed at it, desperate to share that with a friend because, you know, it's so them or oh, my goodness, that's really resonated with me. Like, you know, I really need to say something back to that or it's an opinion. So have a bit of a think about, you know, who your customers are, where they are equally. If you go into. Maybe if you look at all of your recent Instagram content next to all your. All your recent Facebook content, you'll be able to get a bit of a feel for where the peaks and troughs are if you're posting different content. So it's just a couple of ideas, but it kind of depends on your business usually. Karen, I did notice you don't have a pet retailer category on your content selective area. I will add that in. So basically anything that we don't have, it's because we've gotten to a point where we've got hundreds of different sectors. But if we don't, if we don't fully represent your sector well, I'll speak to the team about getting it added in because it's usually me that does the content. So that's fine. So we need pet retailer and we need diy. That's two things. Karen, should I be engaging with people or who just like on Facebook or Instagram? Should I be engaging with people who just like on. Yeah, there's no reason why not to. I mean, really, what you want them to do, if they're just liking you want them to be engaging back. So people who, for example, like your post on Facebook, what you can do with them is you can actually invite them back to follow your page. So when you click into. If I've gone onto Facebook and I've liked one of your posts, if you click into the likes, if they don't follow your page and you've got that option for your business page, invite them back to follow your page. And that's a good way of engaging with them. And you can't really talk to them otherwise because you can't DM them or anything like that. They're not engaging with you. But what you can do is at the very least, you know, invite them back to follow your page and that's a bit of engagement that way, if that makes any sense. Catherine, I was wondering how often one should post on Instagram. I mean, for daily posts, it feels quite a lot. You're Austin's Department store in Newton Abbott. Do you know what? There's no. There's no exact answer to that. The biggest thing you can do is Engage page, there is no point in posting to no one. So if, for example, you posted every single day, you've got, I don't know, a thousand people on there and you're getting one like, then you need to get, you need to get new eyes on you. And that is only done through either paying for it, AKA through ads or engagement. So liking people's stories, sharing other people's content, tagging in, people, getting involved in the hashtags, using new hashtags like that is basically the engagement and engagement strategy. But if you are posting every day and you're getting engagement, great. But no, you're not gonna, you know, no one's gonna die if you don't do a post that day. So I mean, for some businesses, they do three in a week. So it's like maybe like every other day. But go on to Instagram and see when your most, when your best posts are engaged with and you can do the same on. Maybe you can look at the times when your posts are most engaged with. And if it is only a couple of days out of the week, then just do that. And again in the content scheduler, you can do that as well. Well, right, I'm going to come back to some of the rest of these questions in a second. So speaking about engaging locally, so you can go in and join your conversation locally by going in here. So create content here. I'm just going to quickly show you this because this will be really beneficial to exactly what I've just been asked really about sort of how you generate more people to engage with you. One of the best ways is actually engaging within your platform place. So say you're in Poole, say you're in Eastern Abbott, say you're in West Sussex on today, didn't we. I've just chosen Pool because we were having to be talking about it yesterday. So here, if you go into maybe platform and go into engage on your dashboard, you've got group and location in location. What this is showing me is all of the, all of the businesses that are getting engagement and you can go for all or local. All will bring up everyone from, you know, new look to Starbucks and everybody because they've got a local presence. But local brings up all the local businesses. Now when I think about this, people sometimes freak out and go, well, I can't engage with them because they're a local business. And you know, why would I engage with that? If you are a DIY store based in. I'm not going to say you can have it because that's the first thing that someone said there, then why wouldn't I want to get involved in this conversation here with the project climbing center which has six to nine people engaging with it and two comments. Why would I not want to get involved in that? Because guess what, they live in the area, they are involved in the area. They might know people who need DIY products in the area. Same with the dog or the pet supplier, same with the menswear retailer. So if they're getting engagement and they're in your place and you need to drive physical footfall, this is how you do it. You engage back with their content. And if it's something actually that might be a real interest to your followers, you can literally create the post out of it. And it will, it will share the post for you. So you're not even having to come up with it. You can take it and share it to your stories. You supporting them gets their eyes on you, which equally might lead to a collaboration, it might lead to them supporting you. But if nothing else, it digitally signposts anybody who's engaged with that piece of content. This one has five and a half thousand or 5.2 thousand engagements and this young minds, it's huge. And 17 comments. Again, if that's something that resonates with you, go in there, comment, recreate the post, share the post. That is how you get more of the right eyes in your place to you. So just I just wanted to quickly show you that because that is honestly something that everybody forgets and it is so, so, so important. Okay, go back to webinar and I'll come back to some of your questions. You guys are asking loads today, which I love. Please keep that coming because it really helps me because it means that I can keep delivering really good stuff for you guys the next time show up locally. So everybody's got their own high street guide and basically we've kind of done this hard work for you. So basically if you guys are in a place which you are and you are already posting on say Instagram, then we've already collated that for you. So we've already got all of your. Why is that going there? And we've already got your High street guide there. So basically here when you go on to the system, we've got a, it's called Local Rewards. But basically what it is is a high street guide. So we've got for every single place in the UK we have a high street guide. And basically all we've done is we pull together everyone's instagram post and they're all here. So I did it for pool. And in here you can see it's everyone from love pool to as I just said, it's the most engaged with all or most. And it has your most recent post, but it's all of your posts collated. Now, if I'm a consumer, I can go on here and it basically tells me everything that's going on in my place on that day. So I can see. And also it shows me where all the businesses are. I can do Google Maps to the place I can actually purchase. So I can actually click to go and buy something and if they've got a product on there. But if you're not posting on Instagram, then you're not being seen by a lot of people. So when I say Instagram can be your shop window, this literally is a shop window for your whole place. So if you imagine having a map of everything that's, you know, like it might be your local town. I live in Aylesbury, so I have a map of Aylesbury. I don't look at maps, I look at my phone. I just want to know what's going on. So that is how I find out. So this is basically our digital version. So again, if you need any help with looking at that, then just let us know on that stuff as well. So I'm just going to go back in and answer these questions because there's quite a few coming up here. Guys, is it okay to take someone's photo as as you have and use it in a post? Do I need to worry about copyright? No. So what that's done is that has taken the image and it's taken the post and then it's reposting it. So as long as you tag in the place you got it from and it doesn't matter whether it was a famous quote or something like that, as long as you tag them in, it's totally, totally fine, I promise. So make sure you tag them in. You can't just take someone else's content, but what you can do is repost it especially. So with it, with it, when it's customers, it's slightly different usually obviously, like it's personal posts, so they would, you would only see it if they tag you in. So normally you can reshare it directly. So if they've tagged you in, they're more than happy for it to be reposted as long as, you know, like basically people don't tag you in unless they want it posted. So that's how you do it from a personal perspective. If it's, you know, I don't know, someone wearing like a really nice suit to wedding or something like that, they've tagged you in. How do you post that and say thanks so much. You know we love seeing our customers, you know, do this yada yada. So it's fine. Harriet. Okay, so your retail online and in store you see focus on country clothing. Right? That makes total sense. So no, your market is on Instagram. You need to focus on engagement and thinking about changing up what you're offering on Facebook and on Instagram. What we need to do is find out what is interesting your customers on on Instagram. Best way of doing that is looking at who you would be your key competitors, adding them in and starting to look at their content, what, what's getting the most engagement and then build up your content from there cost of using the platform. So it totally depends. So I think through Byron membership you get a percentage off and it depends on what you need. So basically everything is built up on data. So there's a 14 day free trial. Claire, Sorry, Claire asked a question about the cost of using the platform. So there's a 14 day free trial. So you can actually get in and use all of it anyway. Everybody can get a free account which gives you, you like some of the functionality and then there's a 14 day free trial to use everything where you can just get involved in all of it. And then it just depends on what you need. So it depends on the size of your business, it depends on what functionality you need, all that kind of thing. So just make sure when you go in, if you just click on the little blue button, you just ask the question, someone will come back to you. But to be honest, we lead you through the process anyway. So as, as you go through our system kind of like connects the dots but again any questions just contact us and then Karen So final question here I think going on from previous question people who just like on Instagram. I can't send the same invite on Instagram. No you can't. Is there such a thing or if I, if they already follow but just like each time I don't think I can say thanks for liking. No. So one of the best ways of doing that is actually there's lots of things, there's a couple of things you can do. So usually if they're, if these there's someone that likes everything then what I would do is actually do a post to everybody that's probably a competition or Something like that to drive a bit of engagement. But this is just for followers only and it is to thank everybody for engaging with us, you know, supporting us as a small independent business. What we'd love you to do is we're going to give away this. It might be something tiny, it might be something big. We're going to give away this. But you have to, you have to like, you have to follow and you have to comment as something. So whether it's. Com, usually I would say if it's something shadable, you know, this is something like, you know, like, I don't know, you might give away an afternoon tea, a local cafe, whatever you want to do, and you could take that and it's something that I would want to share with a friend. So it's an experience or, or as something I want to win for someone else. If it's, you know, Mother's Day, Father's Day, a birthday, whatever, that's the best way to get people to go from, from liking your stuff all the time. And that's because it's easy to do. I just like things to get me to comment. You have to really get me to do something, and that's the only way really to do it. The other way to get people to engage with you separately is to swipe up on your stories. So when you go into your. Click on your stories and you can watch your own stories swipe up and you can see who is watching your stories most regularly. Those ones go in and start engaging with their posts. You can literally go in, you can like their post, and as long as they've got an open account, you can like their stuff, you can comment on it. You know, so it might be a personal account, but if it's open, you can go in and do that. And that's not invasive. That's just a really nice way of showing you that actually you're supporting them as much as they're supporting you. You can also create a close, a close friends list on Instagram as well to engage with people that way. So hopefully that has answered your question. I'm just going to come out of here for a second. Done. I'm just marking all of these as done. Guys. Loads of questions today. Right? Fabulous. Right, so looking at this then, as I said, you can add in people, you can look at their content. You can actually get your content physically created for you. And we have loads of people that are doing this already. So we work with everybody from as. I mean, here you've got the cupcake oven You've got so good. We work with every. I speak to everybody from quite literally bed and breakfast owners to business coaches, one man bands, right through to shopping centers that have 300 shops, right through to beds council, those place owners, so. Or place managers. Sorry. Everyone is different and everybody needs a different level as we kind of talked about a minute ago. So just use the platform for what you need, but you wouldn't know it until you actually get involved and start using it. But this is why we do this day in and day out, because we want to help support you guys. So everything is data driven, it's AI powered, as I said, we physically can create the content for you and we help over 25,000 businesses, help reach the right audience with the right message at the right time. So we have 8 million companies, data analyzed daily. We have 25,000 businesses that we're physically training and then we've got 500 plus video training guides and assets. So I've taken from today that we need more pet shops and our pets in that pet area and diy. So I will pass that back to the team as well. So if there's anything else that we're missing, I want to say team, there's loads of us on the background. So just make sure that, you know, these are the people that basically are the people that are answering you when you click the little blue magic button or indeed engaging with you in some way, shape or form separately. So to recap, you can get personalized content created on demand, you can engage with lots of other local businesses, which is the best way of getting them to engage back with you and the best way of reaching more people in your area. Just ask us for help. That's why we're here. So don't wait until the next webinar. Make sure that you go onto the platform, you click the little blue button. Honestly, like, it's why we're here, it's why what we want to help you guys with. So sign up for your free trial today. I'll add the link into. Let's see if I can add it into the chat. Let me do it. And then I see if that's gone. But if not, you will see it there. And yeah, just make sure that you sign up for the next webinar. So we do this. Missed the second week, is it? Yeah, second week. I'm so confused with summer holidays. The second week of every month you will see me here talking about all of these things. So again, if there's any particular topics of conversation you want to talk about, and then please let me know. Oh, Karen, that's really, really sweet. Sage just said, many thanks. Very helpful. Love your webinars, Donna. That's so informative. Oh, thank you so much. That's really, really sweet. Thank you. It's nice to get good feedback, isn't it? So, yeah, I think if there's no other questions, everybody, then I'm really happy to. I'll close it down here. But look, thanks so, so much. Please go on the platform. And I really, really look forward to seeing you guys next time. All right, thanks very much, everyone. No worries.