Cherry Street Coffee House in Seattle, Washington, does a great job on social media. They do an especially smart job translating their customer experience to Facebook.

• Before You Start: You have a Facebook business account and want to engage your customers more.
• Learning level: 4 | Creating Solutions
• Article Last Updated:  Sunday, December 4, 2011

Cherry Street Coffee House Does Social Media

Cherry Street Coffee House is a local chain in the Seattle metropolitan area that provides coffee, lunch, and pastry items. Each location is full of bright artwork, friendly conversation, and the smells of food and coffee. Started in 1997, the business has grown to five locations, and earns great reviews and numerous local awards.

Cherry Street Coffee House has a diverse social media presence that includes a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, and embraces Yelp and Urbanspoon. They advertise their social media passport prominently on their website and blog.

Social media allows you to open the doors of your business so people can experience your business online. It lets you move your customer conversations online, but it also lets you show people what your business cares about. At Cherry Street Coffee House, they care about the customer experience, and it shows up in their social media efforts.

Cherry Street Coffee House On Facebook

A quick look at the Cherry Street Coffee House official Facebook page shows that they use Facebook as a central location to pull together all of their social media presence. They have tabs for video, photographs, their YouTube presence, and their Twitter presence. The YouTube and Twitter tabs come from applications they purchased, and showcase the most recent videos and tweets. Pulling all of this content together in one place helps to strengthen their social media presence.

In going through their wall, you see that they allow their community to post items, and they don’t segregate community content from business content. The wall is mostly business content, but if you look through the history, you see items from customers posted as well. This encourages a sense of community.

Borrow These Ideas

Cherry Street Coffee House offers many smart ideas on their Facebook presence that you can borrow and adapt for your business.

• Develop and share content that showcases your products and services. They post a wide range of content including photographs and videos. They cross post the content on Facebook and either Flickr or YouTube for maximum community reach.
• Simplify your online presence. They have five locations, but rather than have five separate pages, they combine them for maximum impact with minimal effort.
• Post frequently. They post on average 1-4 times each business day, and they post a variety of content.
• Post timing is important. They frequently post before a meal time with a photograph of something freshly prepared.
• Share other people’s good reviews of your business. They add mentions of their business in the local media with links to the media outlet and the associated article, video, or audio file. They make it easy for people to access this coverage.
• Include your customers and employees. They mix in photographs of customers and employees. You can use a cell phone for candid photos, but it might be better if you have an inexpensive digital camera at the ready.
• Have a sense of humor. They share things that make them laugh. It gives the impression that it’s a fun place to work and visit.
• Cross post your blog entries. They share some blog posts, but not all of them. One interesting observation is that they blog about promotions but don’t post them on Facebook.
• Be involved in the community. They promote local events and they participate in community service projects. If you allow someone to post a sign in your business, why not also share their event on Facebook?

Your turn: What is the smartest Facebook tip you learned from Cherry Street Coffee House? Share your observations here.

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