Retail Dietitians on Facebook: Engaging Your Community
By The Digital Team at ConAgra Foods
As a retail dietitian, you spend many hours thinking of ways to engage your Community within the store. Likewise, Community engagement is just as important in social media. When people like, share or comment on a Facebook post this action increases the likelihood that your Facebook post will receive high visibility in other people’s newsfeeds. The end result? High Facebook visibility provides you the chance to promote health messages and products, while increasing visibility of your store and the services you offer.
Below you will find a list of best practices to keep in mind when crafting your Facebook posts, along with sample posts that put these best practices into action.
Facebook Best Practices
Create an editorial calendar
- Investing a few hours per month to outline the content that you will post the next month ensures you will have engaging content ready to go when the time comes.
- Utilize health observances, holidays and seasonal opportunities to tie in content, and keep a folder of recipes/articles/websites that you come across on a daily basis that may be of interest for your Community.
- Use Facebook as a platform to promote store events and sales. It’s also a great place to intercept shoppers looking for meal ideas and recipes.
Know your Community.
- Facebook Insights provides a lot of great information on your Community. You can find demographic data about your audience and also see how they are discovering and responding to your posts. Experiment with different type of posts to see what your audience responds to best.
- An example is Healthy Choice. The brand has more than 300,000 Likes on Facebook and they make sure they are customizing content to what their Community likes the most. They found that inspirational quotes and visuals kept their Healthy Choice fans motivated so you’ll see more and more content geared toward inspiration.
Less is more
- Craft posts at a fifth grade reading level, as your audience will respond best to quick and easy-to-understand language. Also, try and keep posts as short as a tweet, which is 140 characters or less.
Ask for interaction
- Posts asking for ‘likes’ get a 200+% bump in ‘likes’, according to research by Shoutlet. By asking your audience to interact, you will also learn more about them; what kinds of things they react to and how to interact with them in the future.
Add something enticing
- This could be a link, a photo, or a video. Just make it something clickable or sharable and appealing.
- Use photos in your posts as often as possible
- A picture is literally worth a thousand words in this case, as Facebook is a very highly visual platform. Share with your Community as many visually appealing photos as possible.
Post 2-3 times per day for optimal engagement
- Because Facebook selects the posts you see as a user, this ensures that the entire Community will see at least one post every day.
Types of Posts:
The following are real posts that have been used via Facebook to get feedback and spark sharing.
Open Ended Questions:
- A new study found that people who ate popcorn as a snack for three months increased their consumption of whole grains. Do you plan to find your whole grain happiness in popcorn?
Asking for a like:
- Did you know that eating one cup of tomatoes (canned or paste) can increase your lycopene levels? Thumbs up if you meet this!
Asking for a comment:
- My favorite breakfast this month? A quick scramble of egg whites, spinach and cheese. What’s your favorite healthy, yet filling breakfast?
Fill in the blank:
- Summer is almost here! I love to grill _________ for a quick weeknight dinner.
