How Firearms Retailers Can Boost Social Media Engagement

More and more people are shopping for firearms these days and some gun stores are pretty crowded. The busiest firearms retailer stores are well stocked with the latest shotguns and rifles for home protection and self-defense.

Social media engagement is one excellent way of attracting new customers as well as keeping regular customers up to speed with what’s going on in your store and in the world of shooting in general.

Social media allows customers to get the information they want fast and efficiently. There are different popular platforms to choose from, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Each of these differs. Twitter gives short bursts of information, Instagram is photo and video-focused and Facebook is like a mixture of the two. And then you also have YouTube, which is video-focused.

It can be tricky to determine how much of your revenue is from people who have seen you on social media and how much is not. There are ways you can find out how your social media marketing is performing though.

Take Facebook for example. You can see how many people view and share a specific post. If you see that one of your posts has 10,000 views then you know that’s how many people have seen your post.

Unless you’re a whizz at social media marketing yourself, it’s worth getting a person or team to handle yours, since your competitors are likely to be using social media as well and you want to stand out.

Some Strategies to Try

Generic posts, such as photos of guns, will always get views. However, if you can fine-tune your post and make it relevant to the local area, you can expect more views and interaction. This type of information can be anything from gun regulations to politics concerning gun ownership. Make sure you’re posts are all just trying to sell something.

If you also offer interesting information, people will be more like to follow your social media account.

Post tips about shooting or how-to articles like how to clean your shotgun or which gun to choose for which purpose. Gun reviews are also interesting or you could run some contests. Also, ask your followers questions such as why they prefer the gun they do, what features they like or don’t like, or where their next hunting expedition will be.

Don’t put prices in your posts because Facebook doesn’t like that and views it as a sales post. You can always say on a post to message you for pricing.

See which of your staff use social media and find out where their strengths like. Perhaps one often posts videos on YouTube about another hobby, in which case you could ask them to put up a couple of videos relevant to your store.

However you tackle your social media marketing, it’s important to be aware you have a lot of competition. Try to come up with creative ways to get potential customers’ attention and make your posts relevant and interesting. It’s up to you whether you want to use paid posting or not.

You might give it a try, so you post is visible to more people, or you could stick with organic posting and perhaps you’ll manage to get a lot of business that way. Experiment and see which seems to work best for your business and then make sure you post regularly to keep your store at the forefront of customers’ minds.