How To Boost Small Business Success Using Social Media: The Case of Apollo Box

At Apollo Box, we help customers discover, collect, and share the world’s most creative products. In order to accomplish this mission, we needed to build an audience on social media. Starting a successful business requires gathering a strong following to support your mission. As a new small business, gaining that initial following can be incredibly hard. When we started in 2015, we launched our Facebook page as soon as possible so we could start to gain a following and get to know our target audience. From there, we worked on perfecting our content and interacting with our followers. As we grew and continued to improve, our followers continued to increase. Our Facebook page was vital in growing our customer base and bringing people to our store.  Here are a few tips on how we grew from the beginning until now. 

Make Interesting Content

We learned early on that it was better to engage fans with our content rather than hard selling our products. Our post descriptions are meant to encourage discussion. We use pretty pictures and sometimes provide videos to help people learn more about the products. We also have the benefit of having very interesting products. One of our early posts about our Creepy Baby Face candle with tears sparked a lot of discussion and craze around the product. That type of organic interaction really helps to boost our followers.  We started mixing in our daily blog posts later on. Our blog was initially set up to introduce future products from vendors that are still in the crowdfunding stages. These posts allow us to capture the imagination of our audience and keep them updated on the latest innovations in our field before they reach the market. We also write about our current products and the stories behind them.  We began running our Instagram in a similar manner to our Facebook. Once we did some initial testing and settled on a comfortable format for our posts, we needed to figure out the right times to post them. For both Facebook and Instagram, we generally send out two or three posts spread throughout the day to maintain a consistent presence on people’s social media feeds while not overloading them. This increase in the quantity and quality of our content also helped grow our Instagram followers from around 500 to over 4,500 in the span of three months.   

Interact with your audience

As soon as we started, we knew that we wanted to add a personal touch to our social media pages. At the beginning, our founder would personally engage with the Facebook community and start discussions to keep people engaged. As our fan base grew, we scaled our interactions to retain our followers. One of our first events was a promotion for our Levitating Speaker. We challenged our fans to try and make their own levitating device out of ordinary magnets for the chance at a free Levitating Speaker from our store.  People got very engaged and made their own experiments, which helped us to grow a lot of followers. These events really help our Facebook followers stay engaged with our brand. The same can be said of other social media. We have been very successful on Instagram by engaging with our followers and answering questions and comments. On Twitter, keeping and growing followers is highly dependent on engaging with them via retweets and replies. Choosing when and how to respond to others on Twitter can make a big difference. It’s not uncommon to see negative feedback on social media. Negative comments should be handled directly, respectfully, and uncritically. We definitely don’t want to delete them. If we are able to talk to the person in a friendly and honest manner, we might be able to turn criticisms into positive feedback.   

Don’t be Afraid to Fail, Be Patient

We had to try all different types of posts before we got a feeling for what works. Don’t be afraid to fail. Sometimes, we set up a post and it wouldn’t gain any traction for two weeks or even a month before it suddenly skyrocketed in popularity. Sometimes we needed to be patient to see results. It took us a lot of trial and error before we found the perfect alignment for our Facebook posts. We needed to give enough information, but not so much that people won’t read it. We also had to make sure to include interesting visuals to keep people from scrolling past our posts.   

Be Data Driven, Use Advertising Intelligently

Early on, we needed to use advertisements to drive our initial traffic. But we needed to ensure that our content was interesting enough to retain our audience and grow our organic traffic as well. If the posts are boring, even if they are boosted, no one will like it. As you learn more about how to craft your content, you need to monitor the performance using Facebook and Google Analytics. Tracking the post performance helps to determine what type of content works best for your audience. There are plenty of third-party tools for Facebook that can boost the reach of your advertising campaigns besides Facebook’s own Power Editor. The most popular of these is probably Ad Expresso. Other tools such as Owaya, Social Ads Tool, and Ad Stage all work similarly, but introduce different features and functionality.   

Work with Social Media Influencers

We work with influencers across different media platforms. This helps us to reach out on platforms where we have less of a presence and bring together people around common interests. Influencer marketing is a great way to generate sales. Sales are often generated the moment an influencer mentions a product, depending on the size of the influencer’s channel and the length of the campaign. When looking for influencers, we look for people who are creating original content and actively engaging with their audience. Their reach and target audience are important to consider, because it will determine the value they have for your business. Influencers act as a link between a brand and market awareness. Influencers are unrivaled in the power they have to build awareness. They often rank far above traditional PR strategies, and are very important for gaining exposure in highly saturated marketplaces. We have found a lot of influencers through YouTube, because people often want to know how a product works before they buy it. At Apollo Box, we let our influencers select products they are interested in reviewing. Once we establish the relationship, they become long-term partners who we share products with on a regular basis. We are always looking for new influencers. Contact us if you are interested.  At Apollo Box we help customers discover, collect, and share the world’s most creative products. We hand-pick every product from vendors around the world. Find unique gifts for your family and friends, and use augmented reality to virtually place them in your room before you buy them. With our curated AR shopping platform, a new era of online shopping is here.