Analyzing Your Social Media Plan

Having a clear social media plan is extremely important when deciding to grow your business from a website to multiple online platforms. Without a plan that follows a solid mission statement, your brand may not convey the correct meaning or message that you intend. In order to better understand the implications of a good social media plan, I decided to look into my own food Instagram that also serves as a link to my small cake business. Doing so will not only help me understand what I need to improve on but will also help me better tailor my content to my audience.

@sweettreatsothereats Instagram:

I have had my food Instagram page for a couple of years now. Originally it was only used as a passion page and served as a fun way for me to document pictures of food that I was eating both homemade, found locally, and from travels. Recently though, as I have been home and not going out to eat, my page transformed into a baking/food blog of sorts. It has become a way for me to show others what I have been making as well as a way to connect and inspire others to have fun in the kitchen.

The content on this page consists of a mix between pictures of food that I made with pictures that I took from restaurants. With my homemade content, I use the caption to describe where I found the recipe along tips and ideas that I think are helpful so my followers can try it themselves. I have found that high quality pictures result in way higher interactions with the post along with higher comments and likes. Because of this, I have adapted the quality over quantity mentality and only post quality pictures that I know my followers will enjoy.

Through the posting of better content, I have seen my following steadily increase, especially over the past month or two. On my Instagram, the demographics are made up of 75% of females aged 18-34 most prominently from Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. As I fit into this demographic, I always test the content on myself through asking myself if I like the content and would follow this page. This helps me further determine what kind of images to post. For example, most of my following is located in the Chicagoland area, and posts from restaurants in the city or suburbs always get higher engagement than those from other places. This shows me that my followers want to see more pictures of restaurants in this area and that I should focus on collecting that type of content.

Sweet Treats Cakery:

In the past month or so I started my own small cake business. Baking, especially cakes, has always been a big passion of mine. Since I have been home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I challenged myself to start this business. As all should when beginning a business, I made my own website, and this was great, but I still needed way to get my work and information out to the public. Because my food Instagram has been such a success, I decided that these two would be connected and that my existing food Instagram would serve as a social media platform for my cake business as well as the other fun foods and desserts.

When I initially started this business, I shared my website link through my personal Facebook account. Although it got a great response, I have come to realize that having a devoted Facebook page for my cake business will open up many more doors. Instagram demographics have shown that this platform generally has younger people on it, whereas Facebook caters towards a slightly older crowd. I believe that the addition of a Facebook page would expand the reach and knowledge of my business to people that may not use Instagram.

Overall, I think that my social media presence for my cake business has gotten off to a great start, but definitely has room to grow. While my current Instagram has been great for multiple different type of food posts, now that my cake business has grown, I need to start posting more cake related content in order to adequately drive in more customers. Taking the time to look deeper into my social media plan and actually analyze the information within has allowed me to better plan for the future. Simply having social media isn’t enough. You need to be able to understand the information and learn from it in order to grow your business to where you want it to be.