Drycleaners who advertise on or connect with their customers via social media need to stay on top of their accounts, and post regularly – if they want to attract viewers. As a busy business owner or manager, you might be approaching this weekly duty with boredom, or even dread. With the Effortless Social Media Program from the Drycleaning and Laundry Institute (DLI), however, you can say goodbye to the hassle of coming up with interesting content on a regular basis. Let us do it for you!
The first step in utilizing the Effortless Social Media Program is to sign up for one or more business pages on Facebook. (While you’re at it, claim your business on Google Maps and take control of your business’s presence on review websites such as LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Angie’s List, etc.) Signing up for a business account on Facebook will allow you to interact directly with your client-base, tackling service issues openly and publicly as well as rapidly disseminating information about sales and special events. Having a presence on social media allows business owners and managers to reach their clientele from any laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. “Once Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat show signs that they can bring in sales to cleaners we will add them to the program,” said Ricardo Gonzalez, who was until recently a program developer for DLI. (If you have been successful promoting your business using a social media application other than Facebook, please let us know which one it is and how it has helped you gain customers; we plan to expand the Effortless Social Media program to platforms other than Facebook once these have proven their marketing worth.) Further instructions on how to get this ball rolling are available in the social media modules found here, on DLI’s website under Social Media Modules. Be sure to hold onto the username and password used to make the account, since you’ll need them to grant DLI’s team the privilege of editing your page. (The Drycleaning and Laundry Institute is dedicated to your privacy and safety and will never divulge, share, or reveal your private or sensitive information to a third party or parties. Editing privileges will not give us the ability to see, alter, or otherwise affect your private information such as username and password.)
Once you’ve set up your business’s Facebook page to your liking (making sure to double-check that all contact information and operating hours are accurate), go to http://dlionline.org/esm to sign up for DLI’s Effortless Social Media Program. After filling in the required information such as your member ID number and company name, one of DLI’s staff-members will contact you with instructions on how to give our marketing experts editing privileges on the page or pages. “This service will not interfere with any cleaner posting to their own feeds,” Gonzalez said, meaning that each drycleaner will retain full control over the Facebook page of his or her business. “You can also edit a post DLI adds and replace it with your own version by clicking [the drop-down menu] on the top right of each post and clicking [Edit].” You’ll be able to post updates and sales information as you see fit, and remove any post or posts you don’t want included on your page. “Cleaners can add their own sales or promotions,” Gonzalez said, “but they never have to worry about having fresh content available for their customers.” By signing up for the Effortless Social Media Program, your page will be regularly updated with engaging, humorous, and primarily drycleaning related material. Past posts have included a history of drycleaning as well as internet memes related to the field. Regular updates are important because actively managed social media pages are preferred by service providers over inactive ones, the latter getting passed over and left out of feeds.
The Effortless Social Media Program, which is free to members, helps busy shop owners and operations managers keep their businesses relevant in the digital age. A social media page that is updated regularly is one that gets visited regularly, which is important for any business that wants to stay fresh, and viable.
To sign up for the Effortless Social Media program, visit http://dlionline.org/esm or call DLI at 1 (800) 638-2627 for assistance.
