My friend, a former City trader, and myself, an ex PWC chartered accountant, were hit by the recession just like many others, so we decided to take advantage of the time we had, team up and start a new business - Jealous. We have just last week launched our range of natural, vegetarian sweet boxes and although I won't bore you with our sales pitch or how we got to our branding and product decisions, I thought readers of social media today might be interested in a first person account of how we got started on social networks. At the time of me posting this, we have 212 fans on Facebook and 117 followers on Twitter, which doesn't sound very many but I'm really proud of the headway Jealous has made in just three weeks. Plus, the engagement stats we have seen from our fans and followers at such an early stage have been amazing, which is hopefully down to us carefully considering everything, which I'd like to share with you.
Making sure the brand is coherent across the social platforms and our website was really important to us, as sometimes when you land on a Twitter or Facebook page you have to take a second glance to make sure you have found the right company. To do this we made sure the logo and graphics were clearly shown as well as the products - the look and feel of the brand is central to Jealous and this also gives users a consistent journey. It was also recommended to us to create a landing tab on Facebook, which helps to provide a clear starting point from which to engage with potential new fans from the outset. I think this has really helped and here is an article I found on SMT that will explain more.
Consistency is also key in the wording, from the social platforms to our marketing materials. The messages in our bio, info and descriptions are on brand and tie up - we don't want to confuse people who visit all of the sites we appear on. I think it's also better to have your website URL match the Facebook URL as well as the Twitter ID but unfortunately we got so excited and got ahead of ourselves. We registered with Facebook as /JealousSweets as opposed to /TheJealousLife but it hasn't seemed to impact on people finding us with various searches, which is thankfully very good news for us!
We next planned our content a week or so in advance, and will continue to do so, making sure we have two or three Facebook posts a day and between five and ten Tweets, plus the replies to people who want to talk to us. It can be time consuming sometimes but engaging with people is the point of the exercise and we're very happy our fans want to chat. It might be more difficult when we get hundreds, and hopefully thousands, of followers but we're making the most of being able to converse with, who we see to be, our very first brand ambassadors. Saying that, we decided from the start that we should treat 20 followers the same as 120,000, by always thanking them and rewarding them, for example, with giveaways.
On Twitter, we found some individuals that we wanted to engage with, such as bloggers, journalists and potential customers as well as brands we felt we have an affinity with. We aspire to be a lifestyle brand so we thought it was a good move to align Jealous with magazines such as Cosmopolitan and products like Jimmy Choo shoes early on, and especially with Selfridges, which is currently selling the candy gifts for a six weeks exclusivity period. By association and engagement, we hope Jealous will be on the tips of everyone's tongues and that our fan figures will hit the roof!
If you're thinking about starting or are currently launching a new business, I hope you've found this useful - and by all means, get in touch with us on Twitter and Facebook or visit our website.
