How to use social media to market your deals

Each week RN speaks to two retailers to find out how they use social media to market their stores and build stronger ties with their communities. This week Darren Rackham finds out how retailers Rebecca King and Pinda Cheema use Facebook and Twitter to tell customers about their in-store promotions.

Rebecca King, Londis, London Road, East Retford, Nottinghamshire

“Facebook is brilliant for us for promoting special offers. Some things don’t work out but, on the whole, it’s really useful. We had a lot of Red Bull in stock recently and it wasn’t shifting so we put it up on Facebook and we sold the lot really quickly. During the recent Bank Holiday we had a promotion for disposable barbecues and food to put on them and that went really well too. We’ve also used it for advertising our food to go and we’ve seen a lot more people coming in to buy. I’m not that great at using Twitter but we link everything we do on Facebook through so we get all our promotions up there too. It’s all free advertising really and any retailer not currently using social media should get onto it. We’re actually looking to employ staff right now so we’re using Facebook to advertise the position. It would cost us £170 for a small ad with the local paper and we wouldn’t know how many people have seen that whereas we know exactly how many people are looking at our ad online. And it’s free, of course.”

Pinda Cheema, Costcutter, Elm Tree Avenue, Coventry

“We’re really looking to use Facebook to build better ties with our community here. We don’t just want to put product promotions up there because we would rather get people interested in what we’ve got going on with events or news and then get people to come in to the store and see what promotions we have on. We haven’t had a lot of time to use Facebook regularly but in the future I would like to ask a member of staff to be responsible for keeping it up to date. It’s really about getting the right person to do it. We recently heard that we’re the fifth biggest Lottery fundraiser store in the area, with £164,000 raised to date for local charities and projects so that’s the kind of thing we would want to put up there. We’re also going to expand with a new store soon so we would like to get involved in the community that is nearby. We’ll definitely be using social media to do that because we want to make all the ties and links that we can. It’s by engaging with our community that we will look to promote our store.”