Ideas, information and industry news for collegiate retailers

I’ve had my couch for three years, and it boasts tears in the leather, unstitched stitching and bald spots where the bonded leather detached from the fabric. I made a bad purchase decision. However, I did buy a five-year warranty package. Its purpose, to cover anything that is not wear-and-tear and pay for a repair or replacement. Problem solved? Not so fast.

Finding creative ways to interact with your students on Facebook isn't easy. To help, we've compiled a list of quick strategies you can implement that others have found successful.

• Calls to action: If you want interaction, ask for it. Adding a call to action to your Facebook posts such as ‘like this post if you agree!’ or ‘Tell us what you think in the comments section,’ encourages readers to be a part of the discussion.
• Questions: People love to talk on Facebook. Asking questions that are easy to answer and require one-word responses tend to get the most engagement. When you make it about them, they are more likely to jump into the conversation.
• Crowdsource: Give your students a say in their college store. Let them vote on which new items to carry, what product should be on sale next week or even what type of event you should hold next. Companies such as Starbucks and Dell have had success using crowdsourcing as a tool to build engagement, loyalty and business as a whole.
• Offers: Add an incentive to being a fan by providing exclusive discounts. Facebook’s ‘Offers’ feature makes it easy to spread the deal to your fan base and beyond. Facebook ads allow you to track the ad from the time it is clicked through redemption, helping you determine the success of your Facebook marketing.
• Photos: Prove your store is the place to be by snapping pictures at in-store events and uploading them to Facebook. Ask students to tag themselves so the picture, as well as your store’s name, appear in their newsfeed for their friends to see. You can also have students get involved by asking them to post their own snapshots to your page in a photo contest. Use the Spring Break Photo Contest as inspiration.
• Tips: Be the inside authority. Let students know of campus happenings, events and other local updates so they turn to your page for the latest.
• Trivia: Ask questions related to your store, campus, or a specific topic and reward the first to answer correctly with a fun prize. Weber State University created a social media event for their 100^th anniversary, complete with a music video and trivia questions to build engagement through Facebook.
• Caption contest: Ask your fans to caption a specific photo to enter. You can either pick your favorite caption as the winner or make the caption with the most likes the winner. This contest can result waves of comments, often with funny and creative results.

What other strategies do you use to get students talking on social media? Share them with other stores in the comments section below!

The Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Cougar Store is using social media to not only increase sales, but to also serve as the social hub of the university. Serving students as more than a retail outlet, building engagement through social channels is smart business.

Students at Towson University in Towson, Maryland, have the opportunity to win free textbooks for the 2016-17 school year.

On July 15, Mizzou fans took over Busch Stadium to watch the Cardinals go up against the Marlins. This event was part of the launch of a new initiative to co-brand college sports with Major League Baseball. To celebrate the new licensing partnership, the staff at The Mizzou Store and New Era Caps offered Mizzou fans a chance to win two tickets to the game, a one-night stay in a St. Louis area hotel and three MU/Cardinals caps.

If you’re on Snapchat, have you seen a lot of geofilters popping up on people’s stories? You know, those little graphical overlays that feature an illustration of a location or event at which the photo was taken and uploaded?

Foreword Online is proud of its long history of helping stores promote themselves to succeed and help students save. That said, social media can really change a lot in a short amount of time. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter redesign their users' profiles, adjust their algorithms to make it harder for businesses to reach prospective customers without paying for advertising and even do some seemingly minor things that can really change the way a business promotes itself, like change the optimized size of their profile images.

Your store needs to be innovative, diligent in reaching out to customers and as keen at studying the market as your competitors if you want to thrive.

When bookstore employees stare at the miniature mountains of rental returns piling up in their store room at the end of each term, it's often a daunting feeling.

With 100 million daily users, Snapchat is an app that’s already found a devoted audience among millennials. What’s the appeal?

1. Snaps only last for 10 seconds
2. Snaps are all about the visual
3. Snaps can only be seen by your followers

Though these only scratch the surface of what makes the app so popular, they’re a great place to start to explain how Snapchat can be an invaluable tool to increase engagement from your customers, move some merchandise and put a fresh spin on the old flash sale.