What I Learned Managing Social Media for Big Brands That Small Businesses Get Wrong

When I tell clients I worked at Canon USA, Scholastic, Accenture, these titans of industry, they're usually kind of taken aback. Like, wow, that's a lot of expertise in large organizations. And I'm just a mom and pop.

I get it. But I try to show them that even though these are big, complex organizations, the lessons and foundations still apply. It's about consumers. Generating interest. Building connection. Brand identity. Enterprise does it better because they have huge budgets. I understand the concern. But the principles don't change just because your business is smaller.

I ask business owners all the time: who's your customer? And they usually give me a specific person. Maybe a small group. I dig a little deeper and it's still shallow. Not a lot of depth. It's more persons than it is a persona.

Not Being Online At All

When a business owner tells me they're doing fine with just radio, newspaper, or word-of-mouth, I actually endorse that. I'm happy they're doing something because the alternative is worse. But I also want to encourage them to do more and give them reasons why.

When I worked for Canon, we sponsored the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. We did both social and traditional media. In the traditional media, we let people know we were going to be in Albuquerque for these dates, come down and see us at the tent. On social, we ran a contest you could join either in person or online. It worked. We got thousands of submissions. Successful campaign.

The Canon balloon at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. We ran a contest across social and in-person, and got thousands of submissions. Digital and traditional, working together.

For a small business, it doesn't have to be a huge event. But you can cross-advertise. One channel is digital, one is experiential. You get a reinforcing effect. They heard it, they saw it, now they're here.

When owners say they don't have time for social, I let them know that social really is our TV now. It's mainstream. It has been mainstream for years. It's almost the bare minimum at this point. The best thing they can do is start a content calendar. It could be a simple spreadsheet. Just post three times a week. Get them to commit to something and then see why it's beneficial for their business.

Thinking They Know Their Audience

I like to go over content with clients and hear what they have to say about a social post. A lot of times I'll see them pick it apart. I ask them why, and it's almost always from the view of the owner. It's objective from that viewpoint only.

What I try to get them to see is the vantage point of the consumer. What does the consumer need to know? What is their level of expertise? After all, they're coming to you for your expertise. Yes, you have a better eye for it. But don't get in the way of yourself when you're trying to message your consumers. I'm not saying don't quality check your posts. I'm saying don't become a perfectionist to where you don't post at all.

At large organizations, we take weeks, sometimes months, looking at personas. Then we look at them quarterly, yearly. It's an ongoing, evolving process because you're constantly getting data. And remember, data is all stuff that happened in the past. You're trying to use that data to predict what's coming. You want the most current data possible. That's a lot different from how small business owners approach it. From what I've seen, they rarely give their audience a huge amount of thought. They think about persons, not personas.

When I audit clients, I try to find out what data we have. Generally, we at least have sales, so we can start pulling information from there. Maybe their POS captures more information than they thought. Look in the back-end systems. See if there's additional information we can use to create an actual audience profile. From sales alone, we can get days, times, amounts that are popular and start building a picture of what their audience buys.

Another one: if they have social, we can pull information very easily. Often they don't even know that their social media page has analytics. They've never looked at it. That's low-hanging fruit.

Ignoring the Data They Already Have

The most common thing I see is business owners who are actually collecting data and don't even know it. In one way or another, if you run a business, you are somehow collecting data. Even if you just have a Facebook page, you may not be collecting data yourself, but Facebook is. There's a section for analytics where you can parse out your audience. Even having emails is a form of data we can build off of. It's really about auditing and seeing what you have available.

One thing a small business owner can do that I've done at large companies: if you capture emails, you're able to create a lookalike audience on Facebook. On Meta properties, you can say, out of these 500 or 1,000 emails, I want to build an audience that looks like this. That's powerful and it's accessible to anyone.

For business owners who say they don't have time for analytics, I tell them to pay attention to sales. That is a form of analytics. Once you start even noticing that, you can start seeing the ups and downs. You get an idea of why analytics are important because you can see things. You can see the lows. The highs. Patterns start to emerge.

The Real Gap

Many people think budget is what separates enterprise from small business. To some degree, it really is. But it's also the information and knowledge that comes with that budget. A small business may not have budget for a marketing specialist, and that in itself is a huge resource. A marketing specialist can tell you how to strategically build a marketing campaign, where to build it, how to execute, and then how to read the analytics. That's a lot.

The gap is really knowledge.

After reading this, I hope you get invested in looking at your website. Looking at your social media. Knowing that there are opportunities hidden in them that could help boost your presence, your traffic, your revenue. And if you need someone to help guide you, I'm here. Just fill out my contact form and let's get in touch.