The Analysis of Facebook Pages of Small Businesses in Texas; What Works?

     It is one thing to examine social media activity on a grand scale, disconnected from your immediate environment, social circles, or everyday culture, but it is another to look at the social media of individuals or businesses that you interact with personally on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. By examining the social media feeds of local businesses in my community, and in other small town in Texas, I have been able to diagnose what strategies or types of posts either are successful or not for this specific area, population, or simply the business itself via likes, shares, and comments. There is no fix all to make sure a post will be successful or interesting for the audience you are trying to reach, but you can try to simulate the professionals in certain ways that bests reaches the audience your area. For example, social media guru Guy Kawasaki.

     Guy explains specific social media strategies in the article Guy Kawasaki's 10 Tips for a Perfect Social Media Post that can be used to improve the success rate of the posts that you share to various social media platforms. The platform that I focused on specifically during this analysis of local Texas businesses occurred primarily on Facebook, and Guy provides tips for this platform as well. The pages of the bushinesses that I analyzed would function as a brand page where a particular tone and business persona is used to attract a targeted audience. The two businesses analyzed were Court Street Coffee Shop in Seguin, Texas and Kay’s Finds Antique and Unique in Yoakum, Texas. I examined the most recent 20 posts at the time of research and analysis and looked to see how many likes, comments, and shares that each post received and how that correlated with the post itself and what was or was not included.

     The graph above represents the data of how many likes, shares, and comments that the 20 Facebook posts on the Court Street Coffee Shop's page had. Court Street Coffee Shop is a well known establishment in the Seguin community and it has steadily grown over the years to better fit the needs and wants of the community here; both residential and collegiate. It is a coffee shop which automatically increases the interaction that it may receive due to what coffee shops represent to us in society as we know it. A place of gathering, making friends, meeting them, hosting events, and enjoying coffee. Across the board, the numbers for all activity on the posts examined were incredibly low expect for one major outlier and a few higher numbers. The post that received the most attention had 545 likes, 42 shares, and 44 comments. This posts shows two different drinks that the coffee shop is currently offering with a cute and punny caption. Super cute. Super shareable. Super likable. "The easiest thing you can do to attract more readers and to increase interaction is to add a graphic to every post. This simple act can double engagement,” suggests Kawasaki. This type of posts definitely works for the Court Street Coffee Shop and the audience that it is trying to advertise to, which is primarily Seguin residents.


 

     Other posts were not so fortunate in the attention that they received. The post below shows the content of an event that was happening in the coffee shop and a listing of upcoming events. There were only four likes and no comments or shares. Either this is not interesting to those who follow CSCS on Facebook, they are not planning on attending any of these events, or they simply do not feel the need to like, comment on, or share this post with others who may share a similar interest. This could also be due to how the post looks itself. Maybe the picture isn’t interesting enough, maybe a video clip would have worked better, the caption could have been more interactive or emotion-filled. The post may have been too long and many viewers just don’t want to click the “See More” option to continue reading what the post has to say. "I’ve never seen a post that was too short. Most posts are too long. Obviously Twitter has a 140-character limit, but posts for other platforms should be three to five sentences long. If you want to go longer, write a blog post and use social media to drive people to it. You have a few seconds to capture people’s attention—think Tinder, not eHarmony,” said Kawasaki. There are a lot of variables that are attempting to work in unison here and it is hard to say exactly what worked and what didn’t based off of the low audience response that we see.

     Then we see posts that fall somewhere in the middle based off of the amount of reaction that they receive which suggests potential or simply luck in sharing based off of the time in which is was shared or the content within the post. Below we see that Seguin residents obviously would rather win stuff than go to an event if we are solely analyzing social media. This type of post catches more attention and seems to be more important based off of the increased amount of likes that it receives.





     Moving on to a differnt town in Texas, Yoakum, Texas to be exact, we see a very differnt social media dynamic. On Kay’s Finds Antique and Unique Facebook page, we see fewer posts and fewer likes, shares, and comments on all of the posts collectively. This potentially may be because this is a newer business and it has not yet established a strong local or social media presence in the community. The like, share, and comment numbers did not exceed two for this business, regardless of what was posted. There are no posts past January of this year, which means that either this business simply gave up on social media, or they did not find it necessary. to their success. The graph below shows the Facebook activity for the businesses’ posts. Little to no activity can be seen and the highest amount of interaction was two comments on a post with a few singular likes or shares scattered throughout. 

 

     The post above only received one like and one share. This is a low quality picture with one view of the product for sale and a mediocre caption, so this may be an indication as to why it hasn’t really caught anyone’s attention in regards to shareability. Unlike the Court Street Coffee Shop, this business did not have even 20 posts to analyze, for there were only 15 posts total in this businesses social media history on Facebook.

 

     The above post did not receive any response at all. The pictures are still low quality, are at awkward angles, with emotionless captions, and evoke no connection between the audience, potential customers, and the business. I think that antique shops have a real potential to connect with their audience with the cuteness factor, just like the cute coffee post seen earlier by Court Street Coffee Shop, but this has to be taken into consideration and used properly and effectively.

     These two businesses may not be the best examples of effective and shareable social media, but they are great examples of what some smaller, local organizations and businesses are trying to do as far as social media goes. It is a lot of trial and error, which is a good deal of what this business may be doing, but they is not where it can stop. You have to be able to learn form the responses that you receive from your followers via likes, shares, and comments and begin to share more of what you believe people will be more apt to respond to. Do not make it shareable for just one type of audience member, but for multiple types of audience members. An easy way to do this is to continue to reformat posts in multiple ways to reach multiple types of social media users. Links, no links, pictures, no pictures, promotions, no promotions, whatever it takes to grow and promote a relationship between your business and those that you are catering to with the product that you have.