I made a Facebook page for my business. I put pictures on there, tried to start a discussion of new flavor ideas.... (no bites)
I put links to the OSSAS and made a "why do custom cakes cost so much?" post.
I posted my "free 6in round to all brides" policy and my free tasting policy.
Now I don't know what else to put on there! I thought of maybe a video of how to make a bow or something.....but do I really want to teach customers how to do what I want them to pay me for?
What would you put on there? There is a link to my website. I'm not chatty, and I'm not a pastry chef so I have few connections and am limited in what I know about the "biz". I wouldn't know how to fill a blog and have no clue what other content I should put on there. Anyone got any good ideas for me?
You already have a link to your website, so that's the first step. You can also add a line on the signature of your email listing your facebook page, twitter account, etc. Get a twitter account if you don't have one, and use it to announce new posts on your facebook page.
You can also send a suggestion from your page to everyone who's on your friends list to get them to become a fan of your page.
I did invite my friends to join, and most of them have, so I guess I started off right.
I did sign up for twitter, but admit that once I did, I wasn't sure what the heck to do with it. I don't make cakes EVERY day. I'm a low volume shop and honestly don't know what the heck to post about. Plus....I'm not sure how it works. Do you have to invite people, like in FB? I tried to read more about it, but couldn't find much. I'm feeling very old.
getting people to interact takes time, you just have to keep at it. Really though, the purpose os all of that "content" is to get your info to pull up in web searches. It will happen....eventually. Just make sure you are using tags/keywords and putting you contact info so it is tied to you.
Twitter is what you make of it. 90% of the time I tweet in response to other people. 95% of the time I post about cake/business/wedding or something. But let me say, the random tweets about how I love my snuggie usually get the most replies.
I don't know where you're located, but a lot of cities have Twitter hashtags that refer to their city. The hashtag is the # sign with words or abbreviatons after it. I'm in Richmond, VA, so the hashtag for Richmond is #RVA. If I go on twitter and put in #RVA in the search box, it will pull up all of the posts that include #RVA, and I can see what people in Richmond have twittered about. If I add #RVA to the end of my posts, my tweets will come up when other people search for it. That's a good way to get people local to you to see that you're there and in business making cakes.
Just tweet about things like what you're baking, cakes you're decorating, etc. If you like someone else's tweets you can retweet them to your followers. Don't start going on there and telling people you're going to go eat dinner now, nobody wants to hear that. If you see an interesting blog entry somewhere, though, you can post a link to it.
When you post links, use a link-shortening service, I use www.bit.ly (no .com at the end). That lets you take a link that you cut and paste, put it into their shortener, and it gives you a shortened code that you then cut and paste into your tweets. You can track how many people click on it through the bit.ly website, too.
You can also feed entries from your blog directly into twitter if you have an rss feed on your blog (most blog websites have this). I use twitterfeed.com to do that, so every time I post a blog entry it automatically gets posted on my twitter stream.
If you want to schedule tweets, so that you post on a regular basis throughout the day even if you're not at the computer, you can use a free service like socialoomph.com, which you can type a tweet into and schedule if to be posted for you at a certain time. They also have a paid option, but the free service works fine for basic stuff.
The one thing to remember on twitter is that it's a conversation, so don't use every single tweet to tell people to buy your stuff. There are a couple of businesses in my twitter list that are CONSTANTLY twittering "buy from me!" and it gets old really fast. I find that it's good to get your name out to other people in your area, who can then refer you to people, but it's not necessarily the primary way to meet up with brides. Most of my business still comes from vendor referrals, but the benefit to being on twitter is that you'll be able to connect with other vendors in your area so that you're in their minds when the time for them to refer people is there. It also drives people to your website and your blog if you have one.
If you pm me your twitter name I'll add you to my following list, then you'll be able to see everyone I follow and their followers, and it gives you a lot of cake websites to look at, too. People tend to follow you back if you follow them, unless it's some totally random person (there are a lot of people who obviously just follow you to get you to follow them back, because it makes them look like they're more popular...) I have found a lot of cake decorators and foodies by looking through the following lists from other people who follow me.
I don't think I've ever typed the word "follow" so many times in one post before that one. 
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