Five Things To Know This Week:
1) Improve Your Social Media Engagement with Emojis
2) How Business Owners Can Supplement Their Income
3) We All Scream for Ice Cream
4) Are You Forgetting More?
5) Resource of the Week: UENI
Hi Friends of Small Business Edge,
Today is a great day to have a GREAT day! I hope you carpe diem the heck out of the next 24 hours. Work hard, but make sure you take time to do some fun things, too (like me, listening to Bob Seger as I write this newsletter).
I created a summer playlist on Spotify to listen to as I do my work. It very well may be the single greatest playlist ever. If you want to hear what I’m listening to, send me an email, and I will send you a link to the playlist. Even better, send me your favorite song, and I will add it to the list.
Thanks,
Brian
Brian Moran, CEO
Small Business Edge
Brian Moran & Associates
brian@smallbusinessedge.com
Improve Your Social Media Engagement with Emojis
In addition to being National Ice Cream Day (see below), July 17 is also World Emoji Day.
There are about 3,460 emojis right now, and 10 billion emojis are sent every day.
But emojis are not just cute expressions standing in for words. They’re helpful marketing tools.
Contentworks says using emojis “works wonders for engagement. Using an emoji in a tweet can increase engagement by 25%. In a Facebook post, you can see shares increase by 33% and interactions by 57%. For Instagram posts, engagement can go up by 48%.”
Learn more about why you should incorporate emojis in your marketing materials.
How Business Owners Can Supplement Their Income
In these inflationary times, many small business owners are looking for ways to supplement their income. According to Luke Pardue, an economist at Gusto, 33% of their small business customers say they need side hustles to keep their primary businesses going. The same is true for 53% of Black and 49% of Asian American and Pacific Islander business owners.
Shopify’s blog offers some great side hustle ideas for small business owners to consider.
Read more about Shopify’s 24 side hustles to help you keep your company afloat.
We All Scream for Ice Cream
July is National Ice Cream Month—and July 17 is National Ice Cream Day, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And did you know the average American eats about 20 pounds (or 4 gallons) of ice cream a year? (Actually, that sounds low to me.)
Ice cream is not only a treat to eat, but it’s also a big, burgeoning industry—last year, U.S. ice cream makers “churned out more than 1.3 billion gallons of ice cream.” And American ice cream businesses contribute $13 billion to the national economy.
There are many opportunities to get started in the ice cream business, and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Many ice cream chains began with a stand or a truck.
If being an ice cream entrepreneur interests you, Small Business Trends gives you the scoop.
Learn more about starting an ice cream business.
Are You Forgetting More?
Unfortunately, as we age, our memory tends to not be as sharp as when we were younger. But there are some tricks we can do to help bolster our memories—including walking backwards! According to the scientists mentioned in this Fast Company article, it really works.
Learn more about five easy ways to improve your memory.
Small Business Resource: UENI (pronounced You and I)
UENI is a mission-driven organization that has helped 650,000 small businesses get online. Founded in 2014, UENI will build your small business a beautiful website in 7 days for $149 and guaranteed happiness or your money back.
UENI is easy, affordable, and comes with access to high quality human support. The company provides a Done-For-You website that is ecommerce and bookings-enabled and comes with a Google Business Profile, a Zoom call with a website expert to launch your website, an easy-to-use website editor, and lifetime free hosting. The company supports nearly 1,000 different categories of business and builds thousands of new sites every month. I love how they are helping small business owners!
Learn more about how UENI can help your small business get online.
Listen to my podcast with Kathleen here.
