Social Small Biz Case Study: Ollie & Forbes

In the first of a series of case studies looking at how social media is actually being used by small to medium sized businesses, we caught up with Gillian Burke, Owner of online gift service Ollie & Forbes.

Social Small Biz: In no more than 50 words explain your business

Gillian Burke, Owner, Ollie & Forbes: Ollie & Forbes is an online gift service for every occasion, offering a carefully selected range of contemporary children’s toys, with a twist of tradition, beautifully presented in natural gift bags.

Our ranges are suitable for children from 0 to 5 years, and we also provide additional services such as bespoke and corporate offerings

SSB: How do you use social media as a business?

GB: Our main social media outlet is Twitter. When we first started we used Twitter as a pre-launch micro-blog for Ollie & Forbes, I guess a kind of building up the brand, getting our name out there.

We would tweet our daily stress and strains of starting up a new business, detailing on how we were progressing with building our website and cheekily tweeting everyone and anyone who would tweet back for advice, etc.

We now use this outlet to launch new products with links to our website; pre-launch “sneaky peaks” of our new ranges and ask for feedback/comments using Twitpic application; and generally building up the brand by following/being followed by people/businesses of interest.

SSB: What are your business/marketing objectives for social media?

GB: We will be using social media to build up our brand presence, both on a customer and business level. We will continue to build and forge new/current business relationships, as we have found it to be a fantastic networking tool.

SSB: Do you measure the success of your social media marketing? If so, how?

We are currently about to launch version 2 of our website that will enable us to track more efficiently with regard to sales the success of any social media marketing with code tracking. However, at the moment we rely/confined to website reporting from Google Analytics which does not give us an in-depth account of successful social media marketing.

SSB: How does social media fit in with the other marketing your company does?

GB: With Twitter we love the fact that you are restricted to 140 characters and it’s quite informal, therefore your message has to be short and to the point; yet also in line with Twitter etiquette, you do not sell, sell, sell; therefore its great to have an informal, casual, spontaneous marketing policy.

This in turn then slots in-between, around about our more formal marketing strategy. I would also say that it is one of the more unique, cost effective marketing avenues that allows you to obtain instant albeit positive or negative feedback on your products prior to launching them

SSB: Do you have plans to increase your use of social media in 2010?

GB: We did think about branching out into other outlets such as Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg etc; but to be honest, being a small business we just don’t have the time or resource to implement and maintain a decent and dedicated presence on them all.

I do find that Twitter alone can take up quite a large amount of time as you can get caught up in various interesting tweets! We do however envisage using Twitter a lot more in 2010 with regard to marketing and advertising, especially as the cost of print advertising is a bit of a luxury that a small business really cannot afford at the moment.

SSB: What would be your top 3 tips for businesses looking to get involved in social media?

1. Determine who your target audience are and how you want to be perceived; this will in turn help you to decide which social media outlet you require.
2. Don’t think you have to be on Twitter or Facebook because everyone else or a competitor is. Even more so if you do not understand how to operate the social media outlet, let alone being taken for a ride unscrupulously by so called social media guru consultants!
3. Lastly, social media is not a guaranteed quick return. You need to put in the effort and time to build up a lasting presence. Stay focussed on your objectives and don’t believe that the more followers you have the better it gets. I am constantly receiving great advice on Twitter, however, the one bit of it that rings true is to “remember build up quality not quantity”.

Thanks Gillian for some great insights and advice there! If you are working in a small business and fancy sharing your experiences, then do get in touch!