I love finding small businesses that are using Facebook and other social media outlets in the best possible way. When I come upon a business that gives me current, useful information, takes adavantage of the free tools available to build out their presence and engages their audience, it makes me smile. Sometimes I find myself liking a page, even if I don’t ever intend to frequent the business, just because the page is so awesome.
And then you know what happens, I end up frequenting their business because their stuff keeps coming up in my newsfeed and I’m reminded why I liked their page. Since I liked their page, I’m probably going to like their product or service. Because that’s what good social media does!
I’ve decided that it would be fun to regularly highlight the businesses that I think do a great job with their social media and explain why I love them.
First up, Dapple Gray Designs. Full disclosure, the owner is a friend of mine, but she is not a client. She engages her fans, partners with businesses like her own and with blogs whose reader base is her target customer, uses the free apps available to customize her page, rewards and interacts with her fans, and keeps people updated on the most current inventory and news about the business. The only expense for this page, is the product that she gives away. Everything else on here is free.
Dapple Gray Designs, makes and sells adorable children’s clothes at reasonable prices. The clothes are sold on Etsy, at boutiques, and through the Facebook page itself. Suzi, the owner, has worked really hard to grow her fan base and market herself, almost solely through her Facebook business page. In less than a year’s time she has accrued over 1,000 quality fans. I mention quality, because it isn’t all about the number of fans a business has, it’s about the likelihood those fans will frequent the business.
Dapple Gray Designs, partnered with blogs that catered to mothers who would likely purchase her designs and started offering giveaways through these blogs. A condition of entrance, was fanning her page.
Then once people started liking the page, and buying and winning her clothes, she encouraged people to post pictures of their children wearing the clothes. Once people did that, she would repost the pictures to ensure that all of her fans saw the cute kids in the cute clothes.
This is a great way to encourage people to interact with a page. Who doesn’t want to brag about how cute their kids are and hear other people tell them that their kids are in fact, the adorable!?
Suzi also uses her status updates to showcase new products and announce their availability.
And since people are being encouraged to actually go to her page, not just read about Dapple Gray Designs in their newsfeed, Suzi has taken full advantage of the FREE custom tab apps that are available. She’s using, Static HTML for Pages as a welcome landing page, Payvment as a shopping cart from within Facebook, MyEtsy which ports her etsy page to her Facebook page, and the Sweepstakes app to host a giveaway on her page.
On top of all of these tools, Suzi, very cleverly, hyped up a big promotion for when she hit 1,000 fans. Suzi partnered with other shops and designers of handmade goods for children and hosted joint giveaways encouraging entrants to like both the Dapple Gray page and the partner page in order to enter the contest. She used Google Forms to create entrant forms, and the notes section of the Dapple Gray Designs fan page to list the details of entry as well.
The 1,000 fans celebration contest is still running, I’ve entered to win a few things myself! Hats off to Suzi for using all of these tools to her advantage and for doing such a successful job marketing Dapple Gray Designs.
