Using social media to connect with other businesses and their audiences
The great thing about being a vegan business is that even your competitors will share your goals and ethics, meaning linking up with other businesses on social media can create really strong networks. However, remember the bigger the company the less likely a decision-maker will be sat monitoring their social media notifications. For a small business, just interacting with their posts and liking their profile will probably be enough to get them to like you back. Tagging another small company in a post will get you noticed by them and perhaps even a re-share and a comment back. And in doing this, you are exposing your company to their followers too. If they are talking to people that will find your brand interesting too, then you will likely pick up a proportion of those as new followers to your company also.
You can go further by approaching other vegan companies who share a similar audience and issue them a friendly social media challenge. Perhaps you noticed that they sometimes post pictures of the vegan cakes their staff make? Challenge them to a daily bake off where you both post a photo of what cake your team has made that day, tag each other and get your combined followers to vote. Are you both in the fitness industry? Challenge them to who can do the most push-ups in 60 seconds and share the videos on Facebook live. Or are they an ethical business but not vegan – challenge them to go vegan for a week and both document what you eat on your social media pages.
Doing this with a large company though will likely get you little, if anything, in return. Large companies break their social media departments into two teams – the people creating and posting the content, and then the people looking for customer service comments and enquiries. Both will likely be staffed by relatively junior people in the organisation and are in no position to authorise re-sharing your content or liking your page back. However, if your content is so good, your mission so remarkable and unique that they can’t ignore it (AND it fits in with their own brand voice, AND you can get all your followers to pile on with likes, comments, direct messages and emails), then there is a chance, and only a chance, your activities may make it further up the chain to someone who will see value in engaging with you. And, again, this comes back to having a stand-out story or mission and a tribe behind you to help you achieve it. Because if someone with 100k followers who are also in your target market shares your post, then you have hit social gold!
