Twitter: small, sweet sips with 'local' on our lips

Online is best served up
live, with tea and at Beatons!
Why is it we engage more on twitter than facebook where we restrict ourselves to 'fan pages'?  

We're always being asked about this! The answer is to do with our ethos and the fact that the literary, loose leaf tea lovers and local business communities seem to prefer to hang out on twitter. We also like the fact our tearooms can interact live through its local twitter hours.

Our day-to-day twitter engagement is now primarily from @beatonstearooms - ensuring our franchisees and tearoom managers are utterly focused on serving you! Here at 'Beatons Central' we use specially curated lists to help us engage with the literary, local business and national franchise communities. 

Both our twitter, instagram and facebook content point you here, to our website and blog posts, packed full of restorative and sparkling content. It's also where you can check out when and how you can come and engage with us in person at our tearooms! 
Our twitter streams and facebook pages are clean and simple channels pointing you to quality content, and details of interesting events and promotions.

We believe we are with a few other early adopters of the 'less is more' approach - we're uninterested in the number of followers we have, and much more interested in using twitter and facebook to discover what you like, new local authors and local events we can support. We believe the 'you follow me and I'll follow you days' are on their way out.

We're specific in the way we engage online because we are passionate about reflecting our values in whatever we do. You can read our in-depth article here. Social media could take up all our time (and a lot of our budget) when we'd rather be serving up gracious hospitality or organising events in our respective communities!

We like to use social media like this:

favouring quality over quantity following those whose values are aligned to our own or who contribute in a positive way to our local communities
- embracing Gary Vee's 'thank you economy' and thanking those who support us through engagement, re-tweets and our #tweepofthemonth initiative.
- providing a window for potential franchisees and other stakeholders to take a peek and see how Beatons' operates as a franchise business
interacting and supporting our followers in gracious and intuitive, which is sometimes even a little poetic. Rhyming tweets are one of the ways we use poetry as a unique part of our brand!

We hope this gives curious tweeps, instagrammers and facebookers a window into why we choose to engage the way we do. We'd love to hear any feedback you may have - either by e-mail or when you next visit us.


Liz Darcy Jones