Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business

Chapter 6

Business Is Now Personal

When you reduce social media to nothing more than a checkbox, you lose the one thing that makes it work—you.

Small business owners tend to wear many hats—something that usually leaves them little time for strategic activities that have a longer payoff. Instead of blogging to build traffic to their website, they are more likely to be taking care of real customers. So, when they do have time for social media they tend to use it as another form of advertising to bring in more customers.

The irony is that the personal attention they give to their customers is often the one quality that is missing from their social marketing—one that will make the emotional connection that is necessary for it to resonate with their audience. The surest way to drive traffic to your website is to use social marketing to amplify your personal qualities—especially those that make you more authentic. The traditional marketing mindset can be a tough habit to break, but it is essential if you want to understand how social marketing really works.

Why, you may wonder, would people want to know about you personally? That depends upon a number of factors that we all have to answer for ourselves. You may not get the answers you are looking for, but you nevertheless have to give it a shot to learn how to engage people with your business.

Fortunately, there are ways to personalize your business while also maintaining whatever level of privacy you may desire. For example, author ...