4 Lessons Learned From Growing Sand Shack’s Social Media Presence

This past summer has been an exciting time for my company, Sand Shack, and me.  We have seen strong growth and our products are now found in nearly 200 stores around the United States.

Despite founding Sand Shack in 2006, I did not begin to use social media to market the company until recently.  This summer has been an amazing learning experience as to how to use social media for business growth.  Below are four things I’ve learned this past summer.

Blogging Is Not About Selling, It’s About Educating

Our blog has been a huge traffic generator for Sand Shack’s website.  When creating the blog, my desire was to integrate it into our site in such a way that visitors can easily access it as an online resource for ocean conservation news – with or without visiting our store or being a paying customer.  I believe in the power of creating a strong following of non-paying followers, because money will eventually be generated through these non-paying followers (and even if many don’t buy anything, our company mission is fulfilled through educating people about ocean conservation).  A very important aspect of our company blog is that the blog posts do not sell Sand Shack products.  The information relates to our brand through ocean conservation and the occasional mention as to how we are participating in the movement, but we are not trying to sell product through our blog.  This creates trust with our readers and many people come back frequently to read our blog’s content without being bombarded with sales pitches.  In the 4 months our company has been blogging we are now pulling in nearly 300 readers per day.

Networking Is About the Few Rather Than the Many

In my experience, it seems like far too many companies try to get their message out through social media channels through targeting as many people as possible; they try to communicate their message to the masses.  This has never been my understanding of proper use of social media, nor is it how I promote our company.  I would much rather network and become familiar with 5 influential people than 5,000 non-influential people.  Recently, I have used this mindset to network with top bloggers and figures in ocean conservation.  This is something I truly enjoy doing because I am sincerely honored to be able to speak to those who are doing work to save our oceans.  In addition to exchanging emails I usually give these people a free Sand Shack product of a hat or a flip-flop, further cementing our relationship.  Recently, this has generated a lot of good will and even led to articles written about Sand Shack.  As I continue to network with leaders in ocean conservation I even want to get in contact with celebrities who participate in this noble cause.

Facebook Page Creates Loyal Followers

I set up a Facebook page for Sand Shack more than a year ago but didn’t use it until this summer.  One of the reasons I ignored the use of our Facebook Page is that I was living in the prehistoric Facebook days of a “Group”.  I had over 300 members in the Sand Shack group and I didn’t see any need to build a fan base on a page.  Realizing the obvious benefits of a Page over a Group (I won’t go into them here), we began to focus on our page and have begun to build a nice Facebook fan base (currently 185 fans).  We have some exciting things in the pipeline to accelerate the growth of our page to over 1000 highly focused, active, fans by January 2010.

Twitter Use Becomes Repetitive

Unfortunately, Sand Shack has not embraced Twitter to the full extent as it has embraced other forms of social media.  One of the main reasons I haven’t used our Sand Shack Twitter account much is that I have always preferred to use my own personal twitter account for all my tweeting needs.  One thing that has made Twitter easier to use and update is integrating our status updates from our Facebook page to appear on our Twitter stream.  This may be repetitive and not add value to our message online, but it is sufficient for now and seems to be working – as seen through people beginning to retweet our tweets.

Although it is too early for me to see a strong correlation between social media success and increased revenue, as we approach the Christmas shopping season I think it will become more obvious as to how social media use has impacted Sand Shack.  As I go through these lessons, I will be sure to write more on this subject.

If you have a business, what have you learned recently about social media for business?

Tagged as: blogging, business growth, lessons, networking, Sand Shack, social media