Way back in the “digital Dark Ages” – 2005 to be exact– 14-year-old Sascha Roberts used to pass the time building a Myspace page on her desktop.
“I could only spend an hour on the computer and that’s my earliest memory,” she said.
Beyond building a social networking page, she also remembers it as the days of flip phones and going to the movies every week for entertainment.
These days, Myspace may be languishing in the digital landfill, but Roberts is thriving in the social media landscape as co-owner of Honey Buns Social, a Providence-based marketing and content creation company.
Honey Buns helps clients break through with their message in a cluttered digital world, using various media and photography. Her roster includes mostly small food businesses such as Borealis Coffee Co., JaPatty Caribbean Food Truck, and Boon Street Market, as well as a lacrosse team and a makeup artist.
“Our mentality is, there’s no exact formula,” Roberts said. “Algorithms and trends are always changing.”
At first, clients may want reels on Instagram, she says, then it’s a carousel of multiple photos.
“We drive home consistency and post often,” she said. “How do you make your business stand out? With beautiful photos and videos. If your content is consistent and looks amazing, it makes an exclamation point in people’s brains – I know the vibe.”
As a kid growing up in Cumberland, Roberts’ family worked in the restaurant industry. Her dad was a chef and her mom was a bartender.
“I was always around a lot of adults,” Roberts said. “My parents knew how to communicate. I learned how to have a conversation and how to order in a restaurant.”
Roberts was on the high school debate team and in the drama club. She also loved movies and pop culture and sold tickets at Cinema World in Lincoln.
After high school, she headed north to Boston, where she studied journalism at Suffolk University before switching to marketing, but she left before graduating. Inspired by her longtime ties to the hospitality world, Roberts worked in almost every front-of-house job – server, manager, bartender – first at Papa Razzi on Newbury Street in Boston, then at the Garden City location.
After 10 years of long hours and inconsistent pay, she moved on to retail, including a management position with MAC, a high-end, affordable cosmetics company.
“It gave me a sense of what works and looks good, professional but fun,” she said.
In fact, marketing has woven its way throughout her professional life. She left the retail world to become the digital manager of Hey Rhody Magazine. During her three years there, she worked with the publication’s clients, focusing on their online presence and helping them with ads and enhancing their social media. What started as an exploration of small business in Rhode Island morphed to include a podcast, which she hosted, as well as recording and editing interviews.
Asher Schofield, co-owner of Providence-based gift shop Frog & Toad LLC, was in her debut episode.
But Roberts had an itch to start her own business, and while she was still at Hey Rhody, she and her friend, food blogger Laura Afonso, who’s now her business partner, began working on small projects together. These included content creation and photo shoots for local restaurants. The partners had their aha moment while on a shoot.
“We looked at each other and said, ‘This is so much fun.’ Chefs and bartenders make beautiful drinks and dishes, but they may not know how to make them look as beautiful as they can,” Roberts said. “Especially in the restaurant world, everyone is really busy, and they don’t have time to think about what they can do with social media. We specialize in that. We see its impact and we’ve built our business to mirror that.”
The pair launched Honey Buns Social in 2023 and eventually brought on lead photographer Jesse Dufault.
Roberts says it’s important to be flexible in presenting their clients’ content online so they can see a return on investment. She says open conversations are important, and they also follow insight reports, which monitor who the site’s viewers are and how they’re responding.
“Social media is a slow burn, and we can watch the growth,” she said. “One of our clients, Oak Bakeshop, got 50,000 views for a video of one of their baked goods.”
Roberts reminds clients that a day may come when there’s a bad Google review. It’s important to see what’s behind it; maybe it’s a legitimate gripe. Then again, you can’t please everyone all the time, she says.
In her downtime, Roberts and her husband, Bryan, are fixing up their old East Side house and she’ll begrudgingly put down her phone.
“I know you have to,” she said.
But mostly she thinks about work.
“Fingers crossed, social media doesn’t go away,” she said. “We want to continue to help small business; it’s our niche. And for those who are posting, don’t overthink it. Just be out there.”
