Best Social Media Practices for Stoney Clover Lane
Welcome to our Team!
Hello, and welcome! We are so excited to have you join our Stoney Clover Lane Social Media Team! As our company continues to grow, we are continuously looking to improve our social media presence and customer service. We are excited to be working with a fresh set of eyes to help further our online community, and implement what we feel are the best social media practices. We can’t wait to see what you bring to the table!
About Us
If you’re new to us, let me tell you a little bit about our brand. Stoney Clover Lane, also known as Stoney Clover, is a lifestyle and accessories brand that was founded in 2009 by two sisters, Kendall and Libby Glazer. Our company started out by selling handmade bracelets, but has since expanded into customizable travel and organization accessories.
Out of every social media platform, the one we are most active on is Instagram. Our Instagram handle is @stoneyclover. We have 242,000+ followers on this platform and are only following 155 accounts. The accounts that we follow are brands that we either currently have a collaboration with, have previously collaborated with, or brands that we want to collaborate with in the future, as well as Influencers that we currently work with. We would like to keep the number of accounts that we are following to a minimum.
Our Instagram bio will tell you who we are, and what our company offers. It tells you where we are located, and has a link to our website that allows our customers to shop our products online. Our profile photo is our company logo that can be found on the zipper pulls of all of our products.
Brand Voice
Stoney Clover is colorful, creative, organized, welcoming and trendy. Our brand voice is consistent in every Instagram post, Instagram story, comment reply, and customer service response. Those five words are seen in everything we do on social media.
Colorful and vibrant photos are very important to our Instagram because all of our products are exactly that. We offer 16 core color options for every single of one of our nylon products, and introduce additional limited/seasonal color and material options throughout the year. We want our photos to be the most eye-popping and attention-grabbing thing on any Instagram feed.
We strive to be an organizational brand. All of our products help our customers keep everyday things, such as: make up, skin and hair products, snacks, etc. neatly organized. By offering customization on our bags and pouches, our customers can choose how they want to stay organized by labeling their products with letter or symbol patches. Our products are also very helpful when packing for an overnight trip or a weekend getaway. We want this to be apparent through our Instagram because that is where a bulk of our customers come from; we want them to know right away what and who we are.
Stoney Clover is welcoming to anyone and everyone. We strive to be inclusive and encourage diversity and equality. We are very active in social and cultural events, and believe in using our platform and our voice for good. Proceeds for some our products are donated to causes and charities, as specified to the customer at the time of purchase. We want to make sure we speak up and speak out when it’s appropriate.
We like to stay up to date on current fashion trends, and make sure that we are releasing new products that are relevant to our customers. When launching collaborations with different brands, we team up with others who have a similar brand voice as us, and who we know our customers would be interested in. When launching seasonal collections, we use materials that are relevant to that season, such as: sherpa and faux fur in the Winter, corduroy in the Fall, and terry cloth in the Summer. Our Instagram is to reflect these trends.
Word Count and Hashtags
When posting on Instagram, our captions are not to be very wordy, unless the post calls for it. We would like to keep our captions short and sweet, and to the point. If our post is about a new product launch, we want our captions to be quick to read with just the name of the product and the date in which it is launching. However, if necessary, please feel free to post an Instagram caption that reflects the nature of the post, for example: social or cultural events.
We encourage the use of emojis. We recommened using 1–4 emojis on each post. As it was mentioned earlier, we are a colorful brand, and adding a pop of color in the caption keeps our brand voice consistent.
In our posts, we currently don’t use hashtags. When Stoney Clover first started out, we used the hashtags #stoneyclover and #stoneycloverlane in order to get our name out there. As our brand has grown over time, we have stopped using them. However, we do encourage our customers to share their purchases with us on Instagram using those two hashtags. We follow those hashtags on Instagram so that we can stay in touch with our customers, and to be involved in the conversations around our brand. The reason we don’t include hashtags in our photo captions on Instagram is because of the community that we have built. Our customers do most of our marketing for us by creating their own User-Generated Content.
With your help, we would like to implement the use of hashtags into our posts. Our online following continues to grow without hashtags, but we feel as though we could grow even more with the use of hashtags. Those who haven’t heard of us yet would discover us by browsing certain hashtags. We can give some suggestions, but we would like your input as well. Here is what we have come up with: #stoneyclover #stoneycloverlane #scl #lifestyle #fashion #travel #accessories #organization.
When/What to Post
We would like you to post no less than twice per day, and no more than three times per day. We have found that our posts perform the best at 9am and 10pm each day. If posting a third time, we would like you to post at 5pm.
We only post photos that are taken by our Photography Team, created by our Graphic Design Team, or taken by the owners, Kendall and Libby. Our Instagram photos are to highlight our current products, possible customizable options, teasing new collections, products and collaborations, as well as announcing brand events and responding to social and cultural world events.
When Stoney Clover is tagged in an Instagram post, we encourage you to like the post. Let the customer know that we saw the post with a double-tap. We do not repost UGC to our Instagram feed. We do not comment on every single post we are mentioned in, but we do comment on some every so often. If you are going to comment on a post, reply with emojis of hearts, rainbows, smiley faces, or something lighthearted and fun.
When Stoney Clover is tagged in an Instagram Story, only repost those that portray our brand in a positive light. When customers are posting a haul of their most recent purchase, repost it to our Instagram Story. Engage with our customers, and give them an incentive to post about us! Our followers love to engage with us through Instagram Stories, whether by sharing customization inspiration, showing their followers what they’ve purchased or how they use Stoney Clover products in their day-to-day. They love to get reposted!
What we feel is the best social media practice of Stoney Clover is the use of Instagram Live. Before the release of a new product, collection or collaboration, our owner Kendall will always host a Q&A livestream through Instagram Live to answer any and all questions about the new product(s). During these livestreams, Kendall will show an exclusive look at each new product, and make sure each person knows exactly what they are buying, and how to make a purchase. The benefit of this feature is that the owner of our company is interacting with the brand’s customers and followers, and answering questions with an immediate response. The livestreams builds a valuable relationship between the CEO and the customers, and builds a community amongst the viewers.
Customer Service
All of our social media customer service is to be done through our Customer Support email. Under no circumstance will we address customer service inquiries publicly through comments or in direct messages. Our response time to social media comments should be within 24 hours, and our response time through email with a solution should be within 48 hours.
When replying to a negative experience with our brand on social media, you will reply with something along the lines of: “I am so sorry to hear about your negative experience with Stoney Clover. Please reach out to customerservice@stoneyclover.com to speak with us further about this issue.” Please do not copy and paste that same response to each customer/Instagram user. We want the customers to know that there is not a robot responding to their inquiries. When responding via email, we are to maintain our consistent brand voice. Be kind, understanding and helpful and take responsibility when necessary. Always offer some sort of resolution.
If asked a question through an Instagram direct message, respond to it! Answer it to the best of your ability or direct them to the correct department. If the question pertains to private or undisclosed information about not-yet released products or company secrets, politely decline to respond at this time. We encourage you to interact and engage with messages! Leaving our customers on ‘read’ is not something we like to do.
Plan Your Buy
Another important and effective social media practice that we use at Stoney Clover is the use of an online catalog. Whenever we have a new line coming out, we put out something called a Plan Your Buy. A Plan Your Buy is an online catalog that is released before the launch that displays each new product, along with the cost of that product. This is sent out via email to anyone who is subscribed to our email list, as well as our Instagram Stories for our followers to view. This gives the customer a chance to plan in advance what they are going to buy and let them know how much they will have to spend. It serves as a wishlist that allows our customers to check off what they plan on buying, that they are then able to share with their own friends and followers. What this does is creates buzz! It creates excitement and anticipation amongst the community, and gets people talking about our products! We always see an influx of new followers whenever a PYB is released because more and more people are introduced to us through social media.
Events
Stoney Clover puts on a lot of events — from our annual Christmas Tree Farm in the Winter and our Pink Pumpkin Patch in the Fall, to our new store openings, and even our Trunk Shows and Sample Sales! We really know how to put on an event! What we’re even better at is promoting our events on social media. It’s crucial to post about our events on Instagram because it’s where our customers are. The posts are meant to be informative and create a buzz around the event. In order for our customers to know about events and get the information they need about them, we need to promote them on social media.
Examples of Stoney Clover Events on Instagram
Your Value
We have invited you onto our team because of the value that we know that you will bring to our social media presence. We hope that your fresh set of eyes will help us improve on our already exisiting best social media practices. We know that social media is always changing, and that what works today might not work tomorrow. So, if you feel as though we can improve on anything, please feel free to reach out to us. Again, welcome to our team, and we can’t wait to see what we can achieve going forward!
