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You know, some people just get social media. Peg Fitzpatrick is one of those people. In this episode, I chat with Peg—author, speaker, and all-around social media guru—about how small businesses can navigate the tricky waters of social media marketing. From picking the right platform to creating a consistent brand, Peg shares practical, no-nonsense tips that you can implement right away. So, if you’re a small business owner who wants to up their social media game, this episode is for you.
Mastering Social Media for Small Business Success Summary
Key Takeaways
- Brand Consistency Matters: Use tools like Canva to create a cohesive brand identity across all platforms, from logos to social media templates.
- Platform Selection is Key: Focus your efforts on platforms where your customers are most active—don’t try to be everywhere at once.
- Hybrid Social Media Management: A mix of DIY and outsourcing can provide cost-effective, flexible management options for small businesses.
- Social Media Listening for Growth: Engage in social listening to understand customer pain points, trends, and opportunities in your local community.
- Storytelling Drives Engagement: Sharing authentic stories behind your business can build deeper connections with your audience.
Unlocking the Power of Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses
Small businesses are often caught between managing tight budgets, limited time, and the challenge of making social media work for them. But with the right strategies, social media can be one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your business, engage with your community, and build a strong brand presence.
Here are key strategies for mastering social media marketing, social media listening, and how to build an effective plan for your small business.
1. Consistency is Key in Social Media Marketing
The first step in social media marketing success is brand consistency. Whether you’re using Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn, your audience should recognize your brand instantly. From the colors you use to your logo, fonts, and tone, everything needs to be consistent across all platforms.
Small business owners can leverage tools like Canva to easily create templates and maintain a cohesive look and feel in their online presence. Canva’s brand kits allow you to upload your brand assets—logos, colors, and fonts—so that every piece of content you create reinforces your brand identity.
Consistency not only helps you look professional but also builds trust. Think of iconic brands like Coca-Cola and Nike: their logos and colors are instantly recognizable, no matter where you see them. For a small business, having a similar level of consistency across social media platforms ensures that your message doesn’t get diluted.
2. Select the Right Platforms for Your Business
One of the biggest mistakes small business owners make in social media marketing is trying to be everywhere. You don’t need to be on every platform. Instead, focus on where your customers are.
For example, if you’re targeting Gen Z and have the capacity to create video content, TikTok could be the right platform. If your customer base is more professional and business-oriented, LinkedIn might be where you need to invest your time. For small, community-based businesses, Instagram’s location-tagging features can be incredibly useful for connecting with local customers.
The key takeaway: know your audience and invest your energy in the platforms that will give you the best return on investment (ROI).
3. Embrace Hybrid Social Media Management
Small business owners often struggle with the question: should I manage my social media myself or hire an expert? The answer depends on your resources, but for many, a hybrid approach is the best solution.
With a hybrid model, you can outsource some aspects of social media—like content creation or strategy development—while managing the day-to-day posting and engagement in-house. This allows you to maintain control over your brand’s voice and authenticity while benefiting from professional expertise in areas where you may need help.
Many small businesses also benefit from outsourcing specific tasks, such as getting professional photos taken or having a designer create branded templates you can use repeatedly. By working with a professional on a limited basis, you’ll ensure your content remains top-quality without draining your budget.
4. Use Social Media Listening to Understand Your Audience
Social media listening is one of the most underrated tools in small business social media strategies. In simple terms, social media listening is the process of monitoring conversations around specific topics, competitors, and even your own brand across platforms.
For small businesses, social media listening can help you better understand customer pain points, emerging trends, and even the local community’s needs. You can start by monitoring local hashtags or using Instagram’s location tools to see what people in your area are talking about. Are there recurring issues that you can address with your services? What do your competitors’ customers say in the comments section that could reveal opportunities for your business?
You don’t need fancy software to engage in social media listening. Simple tools like Google Alerts, or searching for relevant hashtags, can be enough to start making data-driven decisions. Listening is also key to identifying content that resonates. Look at what your audience engages with most, and create more of that.
5. Storytelling Is a Social Media Superpower
One of the best ways to engage your audience is through storytelling. Customers don’t just buy products—they buy stories, values, and experiences. As a small business owner, you have a unique story that can set you apart from the competition.
Start by sharing the “why” behind your business. What inspired you to start? What passion drives your work? This kind of content builds a personal connection with your audience and gives them a reason to root for your success.
Beyond your origin story, integrate storytelling into the everyday content you share. Highlight customer testimonials, behind-the-scenes moments, or events happening at your business. Just remember to keep it authentic. Too much personal oversharing can backfire, but thoughtful storytelling creates engagement and loyalty.
Conclusion: Social Media is a Game of Strategy, Not Luck
Small business social media strategies aren’t about luck or going viral—they’re about consistency, authenticity, and making informed decisions based on social media listening. By focusing on the platforms that matter to your audience, maintaining brand consistency, and embracing a hybrid management model, you can build a social media presence that works for your business, not against it.
Social media marketing can be overwhelming at times, but when you break it down into actionable steps and focus on what truly matters—your audience, your brand, and your story—you’ll find it can be one of your most powerful marketing tools.
Mastering Social Media for Small Business Success Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is a seasoned social media expert and author of, The Art of Small Business Social Media: A Blueprint for Marketing Success. With a knack for blending practical strategies with engaging content, she helps small business owners and entrepreneurs enhance their online presence.
She is known for her friendly and relatable approach to social media education, drawing on her extensive experience working with top brands. She is passionate about empowering others to succeed in the digital space and always seeks fresh insights to share.
So let’s dive into the art of social media for small business with Peg Fitzpatrick. Peg, welcome back to the podcast.
Peg: Hey, thanks for having me back.
Rich: I love having you back. It’s such a nice thing to see your face again. So you’ve got a new book coming out November 19th, tentatively. What was the impetus to write this new book now?
Peg: I loved The Art of Social Media, that I wrote with Guy. But what I heard a lot from people afterwards is they didn’t want just power tips, but they really wanted how to do every single part of it. Some people are good with just the power tips. You know how to do most things, but maybe you could get a little boost here and there.
This book is literally like A to Z, how to do everything for your social media marketing for a small business. So it’s comprehensive from the beginning to the end, with the most important thing being that it’s platform agnostic, it’s not like how to be good at Instagram or how to post on Facebook. It’s really how to create your brand, how to take your offline brand online and do all the things that you already… I know you already know. But for small business owners who haven’t done it before or they have very small budgets, they have very little time, and they have a lot of stuff they have to do. So how can they do this in a smart way? How can they do this in the most efficient way? And they know it’s going to get results.
At this point in 2024, a lot of people maybe they tried a little bit, maybe they just tried something. It didn’t work, so they quit. And then you hear the classic, “Social media doesn’t work, I tried it.” And that’s not necessarily true, right?
Rich: Exactly. And it sounds like even though social media is so quickly changing, you’ve written this book to be more of an evergreen guide. So even if things change in Facebook or LinkedIn, a lot of the strategies are still going to apply for years to come.
Peg: Correct. Correct. That was the goal. Because during the pandemic all over the country, certainly in my small town, I’m sure in Portland also, small businesses totally crashed and burned because they didn’t have social media, because they didn’t have any way to update people when they had hour changes, or they didn’t have staff that day, or whatever. You saw the businesses that weren’t online just literally, they’re gone now.
And I hate to see small businesses close. It’s like someone’s dream. I always feel like it’s someone’s dream. Like they saved up all their money, they got this cute little shop downtown, they paid God knows how much money for their huge sign. Because all of the offline stuff costs a lot of money, like every single thing to get your actual business started, it’s a huge amount of money. And then I always think, that person’s dream is gone and all their money’s gone.
And now I don’t know what they’re doing, but our country is built on small businesses. And as much as you hear the buzz on the big companies, small businesses are the heart and soul of all of our communities, even big cities have small businesses. I just really wanted to help that individual who has a small business, made all their investments, has this passion for something. And then, so then this book can do that.
Rich: Plus, a lot of big businesses started as small businesses. So there’s that, too.
Peg: Yeah.
Rich: Now, how important is it for small businesses…you talked a little bit about creating a strong brand or creating a strong brand identity. What are some of the steps that a small business can take online to create that strong brand?
Peg: Number one, I’ll say get Canva if you don’t already have it, Because at this point, Canva is literally a powerhouse. I probably talked about Canva when I first came on your show because I did a lot of press, and that was like 10 years ago when nobody had heard of Canva. But now, Canva for small business is where you can create everything in there. Logos are the one thing. You can create logos in Canva. But if you do have a little bit of money, that is a great place to start to have somebody design your logo for you.
But if you have zero money, you can literally go into Canva at this point and create a good logo. They have templates in there. They have ideas in there. But like I said, that is someplace, I do everything in Canva, but I did pay someone to create a logo and do some branding stuff for me, just because it’s a different level.
But if you are on a super tight budget, you definitely can’t afford it. Branding is expensive for a reason, because those people are trained professionals and they use other software that’s more advanced and they create great things. So don’t hate on me designers, I do love you. But small business owners, Canva, you can create a thing called the brand kit in Canva and you can create all the assets that you need.
Because one of the things that if you’re not familiar with using a brand online, people get really they’re like, oh look, there’s hundreds, there’s probably thousands of fonts in there at this point, and you can bring your own fonts. And so with all the choices, people end up doing all these different fonts and all these different colors. And then you end up with a hot mess of a brand instead of something like Coca Cola, who has the same red that they’ve had forever. They have the same logo from like 1912. They’ve never changed, it’s consistent. You could see that anywhere. The Nike swoop, that swoop anywhere.
Finding something that fits your brand and sticking with it. You don’t want to use one thing and then switch to a different font and then use different colors. So creating your brand, it does take some time. I do go over all the steps in there, but basically, you want to come up with, we’ll take Nike for example. Because that swoop, that indicates speed and fastness. There’s visual pieces in there and it is something that’s going to take a little while.
Creating a brand is not something that should take you a half hour. You could technically go in and create one, but it takes longer than that. You need to ask a lot of questions. Is this the right color? Colors mean a lot, too. If you look at color theory, there’s just so many different pieces of it that go really deep. So like I said, you can do something in Canva, but you still have to take quite a bit of time and do it. It is something if you’re reading my book or there’s other books on branding too, even there’s a lot of blog content on it too. So just do some research first to figure out you need a logo, and then you would create a typeface logo, which is just maybe your URL in custom font that you would always have look exactly the same.
That’s one of the things I have in Canva is just like that my URL, but the branding person did it with a glittery font. So it just looks a little bit different than you would do, but it’s consistent. And then I could use it all the time. And then you want three colors, max. You would have two or three main brand colors, and then maybe a little bit unless you’re really great with color, you really don’t need more colors than that.
And then you just got to play around with it. And then you get into other things like brand voice and all of the other parts of your brand. But the main design pieces of your brands are your logo and the typeface logo, and then your colors and your fonts. So you would, and
Rich: And then in Canva, you can also then start creating templates for like social media or email or your website as well that use that consistent branding throughout. Correct?
Peg: Exactly. Yeah. And you can create brand templates and you can save them so they’re always the same. You can take the designs and apply your brand to it. So you could just click on one of their designs and then change the font. One of my favorite Canva things that they have now is where you can change. All the fonts, if you click on it and change it, it will change it like all in the design.
So in Canva you can create postcards for events that you have, just like literally all the assets that you would want in your store, like store signs and just they have traditional marketing within Canva now, and Canva print is amazing. I don’t know if you’ve done any, have you done any Canva print?
Rich: I have a creative director who has his own favorite places to go, so we don’t use that for that, but I have heard great stories about Canva.
Peg: Well, it comes really well, the quality is great, and they donate a tree for every print item. But local places are great, too. If you have somebody local that does a great job. Good printers are hard to find these days. So I have somebody that I do for big projects, but then for smaller projects, I do them right here.
I had a business card recently, my husband came in my office the other day and he picked up a business card and it was one of my personal brand business cards that I would use at conferences and stuff. And it’s very nice. And he was like, “Wow, where did you get these really great cards?” I’m like, “I made them,” because I did. I designed them and I printed them, and voila, I am a brand.
Rich: There you go. You are a brand. Now in the book, you talk about the importance for selecting the right social media platforms. What are the factors that we should consider when we’re trying to decide where to put our attention when it comes to social media?
Peg: That’s a very good question. The first thing is, it’s not everywhere. So if you’re just going to get started, please don’t try to do a whole bunch of different platforms at once. It’s very overwhelming.
The main demographic, I think, in this social climate is the demographic of your customers. So you need to know who your customers are and where you think they would shop. If they’re Gen Z and they’re younger and you have time to create video, TikTok would be great. But if you don’t, if you go on to TikTok and you have no idea what’s going on because it’s a whole different culture over there, maybe Instagram is more your place.
Instagram is great for small businesses. You can tag your location. You can tag all the people in your community. You can add hashtags for your locations. So it’s still a great place to connect in, meet other people.
It definitely depends also on what your business is, with the demographics. So it depends on what you’re selling. Some things would work better on even LinkedIn. Facebook at this point is really hard to reach people. Even the ones that are following your page. And we see that now, of course, on Instagram as well, the great algorithm days are gone. So everybody who likes your account does not see you anymore, unfortunately. But Instagram is still, with the location tools that are on there, really great for small businesses.
Rich: Absolutely. And like you said, it really depends on your business. Like for me, of course we post things to Facebook and Instagram because we offer social media as among other services. But it’s more about just to show the culture of the company. LinkedIn is where we found more success on social media, probably because we have a B2B business. So when people are thinking about business, they’re on LinkedIn. But it really does depend on the kind of business that you’re running.
Peg: And you guys offer professional services. So you’re on LinkedIn, you’re commenting on something that pops up in people’s feed. It’s great. That’s one piece. I also talk about that in the book. For the owner, having the personal LinkedIn account and the business page is important, because it’s a great place to connect with other people.
Rich: Absolutely. I definitely see that our brand has grown from me, and now other members of my team, becoming more active on LinkedIn. And it does feel that it’s emerging as its own platform more than it used to feel, at least to me.
Peg: Definitely. There’s a lot more conversation, and I see you all the time commenting on stuff. So yeah, it definitely is not just among the social media people, but definitely a lot more for other people. It’s still a really low post area though, which is nice. You don’t have to post there too often. It’s not like you have to post a lot.
Rich: Yeah. I tell people if you posted once or twice a week, you’ll probably be in the top 2% of your profession. That’s how little time you really need to invest to become a top user on LinkedIn.
Peg: Yeah. Yeah. And then just make sure you’re checking your messages and connecting with people. I try to connect with people all the time. Like I got a pitch email from someone to come to an event and I couldn’t make the dates that they were offering, but I still connected with them on LinkedIn so maybe they’ll ask me next time.
Rich: And do you find, because obviously there’s the public side of social media where we’re posting things as ourselves or as our company and it’s going into the feed. But do you find that you’re getting a lot of traction in the private areas of these social platforms, Facebook messenger, or LinkedIn messenger, or Instagram, especially as you’re being up on stage. Are you promoting people to reach out to you that way as well?
Peg: I do have a lot of my conversations, indirect messages versus I answer everything online publicly. But I do have a lot of conversations in direct messages, and it’s a great place to pitch, do a soft pitch to get contact information. I feel like direct messages have evolved that way pretty well.
Rich: I feel the same way.
Peg: Yeah, and you’re more comfortable now to reach out to people. Like back in the early days, people felt a lot less comfortable with people sending a message. I remember when Twitter was new, and I was just building my Twitter account back when it was Twitter. I still like to call it Twitter because I don’t like the other name.
But I used to send a message to every single person that followed me, like a personal message, thank you so much. It’s great. And people always thought that it was spam, but it was really me being like, thank you for following me. Because I still appreciate, you got to appreciate when people find you. But I stopped because people were like, is this a bot? But there weren’t even bots to do that at that time, but there were some automated message things. They weren’t so sophisticated.
Rich: Right.
Peg: Back in the day.
Rich: Whenever I send out messages, if I was trying to make sure that they know that it’s a custom message by referencing something, and not in the generic way. It’s “Oh, I really enjoyed your podcast with Peg Fitzpatrick where you discussed…” and then they literally copy and paste the title in. I’m like, that’s not going to get my interest. But if they say something from deep in the interview, “When Peg said this, it was just absolutely brilliant” I’m like, okay, so you actually did listen to that. Now I’m going to pay attention.
And I think the same is true with DM’s. You always have to be authentic when you’re in somebody’s DM’s, because it is a little bit more personal and a little bit more intimate, if you will.
Peg: Yeah. It causes someone to respond to a message. So if it’s not what they’re looking for, it’s annoying.
Rich: Yeah, I agreed.
Peg: You get a notification, then you look and it’s something and you’re like, Oh, really?
Rich: So shifting from the… oh, keep going.
Peg: I was going to say, and that goes to the LinkedIn messages. The second you connect with someone, please do not send them a pitch. That is the worst. Like the worst. When they immediately send you and you regret immediately connecting.
Rich: It’s bad when they pitch you as part of the introduction, but it’s worse when they pitch you as soon as you agree to connect with them. Oh, I just want to connect with you. I’m building my network at… which never works on me anyways. But then you make the connection and they’re like, “Hey, did you know that we have 20% off in the store?” I’m like, okay, forget that.
Peg: I think it’s worse to do it the second one, when they connect with you and then they send you a pitch.
Rich: They’re walking in look, I’m only here to do business. You’re like, okay, either I’m interested or I’m not, and I can move on. But yeah, I don’t like that.
All right. Shifting from the intimate aspect of DM’s back into maybe the more public facing ones. You talk a lot about storytelling in your book. And part of me thinks that okay, anybody can tell a story. And then part of me is, oh my God, it’s such a struggle to do this. So how do you recommend that small businesses weave some of their brand story into some of the stuff they’re sharing online? What tips or techniques have you helped your clients with?
Peg: I think it is easy and hard at the same time. Like you said, I think you really just need to come up with a couple main stories that you would share. I keep going back to this one shop in my town that was one of the ones that closed during the pandemic. And she had a wedding gown business, and it was a beautiful shop. And it was really her dream to own a bridal shop and that’s not that common.
And so her story, just sharing that since I was little, I looked at magazines that my mom had and I always saved the wedding dresses, because they meant so much to me, and it’s like a lifelong heirloom. And I think aside from having something like a bridal shop, sharing your story of how much you loved it, and it was always something that meant so much to you, and how it means a lot to you to connect with a bride, to help her choose everything that goes for her special day, that someone’s really trusting you. And so it’s like telling the story of why you started your business.
The passion that you have for your business is really a superpower. It’s a superpower that nobody else has that. No one else has the same passion for the exact thing that you’re creating. So I feel like just coming up with a couple of stories around that. And then kind of trickling them in things, as is an individual who’s going online, you don’t have to share your whole life story, which is a hard thing to balance, because I think small business owners get that wrong a lot. They overshare personal things, thinking that their personal storytelling, which is not the same like writing.
I have a whole section on it in the crisis part, because there’s the crisis of like world crisis. And then there’s the small business owner started posting their rants on the professional page. And that’s not storytelling and it’s not connecting with people that do that. But storytelling, like going back to the bridal shop, just really connecting it with how you named your business, why you chose to do this. It can be stories about how you choose different gowns, events that you’re holding, different things like that.
So it’s like creating a separate story that connects you and your business. And it doesn’t have to be everything. And it doesn’t have to be a huge amount of stories. It could be a couple that are just reworked every once in a while. Because as a business, you’re not going to have a million new stories about how you started or what your business is. Really, there’s just going to be the main one.
And if it’s a family business, then you have the whole like dry cleaner specifically, generations. Like my grandfather started this business and my father ran it and now I run it. And this is what I do differently. And you could talk about those things. Family businesses are a challenge. You don’t want to post the bad parts of family business, but I think that’s a story to tell right there, too. And people love those.
Rich: Absolutely. Now you’ve touched on this a little bit, but most owners of small businesses have a lot on their plate. They’re wearing a lot of different hats. And so there’s always the option of should I do all my social media myself? Should I hire an outside party to do it for me? Or should I do some sort of hybrid where I’m working with somebody on the outside?
There’s no one size fits all. But what advice might you give somebody who’s trying to determine how much they should take on themselves, versus how much they should hand off to an outside group?
Peg: Honestly, the biggest factor in that is money. Can you afford to do it? And for a small business, if you can’t afford it, I would almost say that hybrid is the best. Until you could really know that somebody could get your message the right way.
Because another thing that I’ve seen with small businesses, which is sad, if they’ve worked with someone who took advantage of them and didn’t do a good job, and they paid a lot of money for it and they feel really burned by it and they don’t want to do it again, which makes sense. Like I totally get that. But that doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to do that.
So a hybrid version where somebody could create information, like create an outline for your suggested posts. And then you could review them, check the text, like doing a hybrid thing. Then you could learn more how to do it. Because the hard thing is if you don’t know how to do it and you’re hiring someone to do it, you don’t necessarily know if they’re doing a good job and you don’t really know if there’s results.
And social media, quote unquote “results” are hard to check anyway. There’s not a huge direct ROI. You’re not going to be able to see I posted this today, and then the next day I got sales. It doesn’t always happen that way because there has to be so many touch points before people buy from any brand. I don’t know if it’s went up. It used to be like seven to eight brand touch points before people would make a sale.
I would say if you could do a hybrid version, that would be really great. Or, even if you’re a small business and you have some time, maybe you could work with a professional to help train you how to do things. If you can’t afford to do it all the time, maybe you could hire someone to coach you, show you what your posts should look like. Create some content.
You can certainly get people to make Canva templates for you. There’s tons of designers out there that can create things that you could use and reuse. And then you could add your own photos in. But if you’re really just, I don’t know how to do this, getting started on your own is hard. And if you have a little bit of money and you can hire someone to do it. But I think a lot of small businesses don’t have the money to do it, in my experience, to just hire someone to do it all would be hard.
Rich: I agree. And I think it’s a struggle for an outside person or agency to create all your content for you, because so much of organic social is those flashpoints in time where something just happened and you want to share like a dish you made or somebody wearing that beautiful wedding dress or something like that, and you’re not going to call the agency or the contractor in every time to take a picture and do a post. So you’re still going to be doing work, so you just have to recognize that there’s going to be some of your own work in there you and you’re going to put a little sweat equity into it.
But you’ve got something that makes me think a little bit harder about, how do we judge these things? And you talked a little bit about the difficulty of tracking exact results. And so what do you recommend owners think about what are any KPIs, key performance indicators, for organic social that we should be paying attention to where we think, okay, now this is working. And when I say ‘working’, that it will ultimately lead to my bottom line.
Peg: So I think one of the things that people get stuck on is follower count, which does really matter, like how many people are following your account. But if you are a small, local business, you’re not going to have tens of thousands of followers. And also, you don’t need them. You really just need the people that are in your community. So it’s more important to have the right users, people following your account. So sometimes you have to weigh things a little bit differently.
So if your account is growing consistently, that’s good. It’s not going to grow a huge, you can set goals for yourself. It is hard to grow accounts and to start from nothing. And it does take a while to grow, but don’t think that just because you’re starting that you’re going to… the viral aspect of things of getting millions of followers. Those numbers are crazy and hardly anybody does that. And even when people go quote unquote “viral”, their accounts don’t necessarily grow. Or I had somebody I saw that was an influencer on TikTok that had a viral, a million plus views. She gained a ton of followers from it. And then a lot of people unfollowed her after because they just weren’t that interested.
So the main thing is that you connect with people who are interested and who are local and who will be your customers. So it might not be a huge amount, but you want it to be the right people. So you can grow your account by putting things in your emails where they can follow you, put things in your store, put things in your windows, follow us on Facebook.
Yelp is another place. You want to build your following on Yelp. I do talk about Yelp in the book too, because it’s not technically social media, but it’s very important to small businesses, reviews are.
Going back to how do you measure the KPIs. So I would say followers count, but it’s not going to be a crazy big number. It’s going to be more, are these the targeted right people that are following you? Is it your customers? Is it people that are local? Is it other small businesses?
A great place to start growing your account is to connect with all the small businesses around you. They’re also trying to grow. You could do events together. There’s a lot of different ways to connect and grow that way. And then there’s analytics within all the different social platforms. You should have a business account for every account that you have.
This should not be your personal Facebook page or a personal Instagram account. Everything should be a business page because. You don’t want to break the terms of service for any of the social platforms. So if you have a Facebook page, an Instagram account, even LinkedIn, you can check different posts to see how many people liked it, how many people viewed it.
Once a month you could go through and keep a little spreadsheet and write stuff down to make sure you’re growing places. I like to use those numbers to go back and find the content that did work and do more of that. And if there’s things that you thought were going to work but didn’t do very well, then don’t do those again.
I just had one of those this week. I made this Instagram post, and it took me forever to make it. It was a carousel, and it had a cute theme to it. And then every single carousel had a video in it. Some had two videos in it. So it took forever to make this thing. It did not do well at all so I learned my lesson. I will not do that again. I’m not even sure if people scroll through the carousel, like two people was like, whatever. So some, you can have the best plans. The best laid plans of mice and pen. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. So I like to use that performance if stuff didn’t do well, then, okay. You just have to look at it like a lesson to learn. You have Google Analytics, if you have a website and you have the analytics from the different social platforms, you can offer if you have promo codes or anything like that that you can trace, those are the kinds of things that I recommend.
Rich: Absolutely. I think those are all good ways. I think those are all good things in terms of how to track them. I feel social media, like Facebook and Instagram, is like I said more… Facebook I think of it like future recruitment for flyte new media. Like I use this to show hey, we went to the L.L. Bean archery range, and we spent the day out there. It’s like people will think, oh my God, it’s such a cool company to work for. So that’s like how I use Facebook primarily. Or to talk about our involvement in the community, say things that we went to or things that we’re planning on going to.
Instagram, I see more as a portfolio of our work and customer stories. And then for me, LinkedIn is a place where I share here’s how we do things, here’s the technical aspects, here’s how you can use AI to do this. So each platform has a slightly different purpose in the way that we look at things.
At the heart of things, I’m a SEO and conversion guy, so I use social media as I need to. And I think this is true for a lot of small businesses, right? I wouldn’t use it if I didn’t have to, but I recognize that this is how the game is played today. I recognize that my audience is here, so I’m going to engage with them here, or not. But that’s basically, I think the best way to use social media these days, it’s just to build those relationships.
And you talk about local. And I agree with you. I think creating those local connections if you are a local business is critical. And engaging with other people’s content on those platforms, especially other businesses, is also critical. These are all things that show the world that you’re part of your local community. And I think that’s very helpful.
Peg: Yeah. Going back to the conversation about creating content, and that reminded me I did a photo shoot, author photos. And the girl that did my photos, she has customers, she’s a photographer, she does headshots and things, but she also just has some clients that she creates content for them every month. And all she does is the photos and videos. So she creates a package for them and just ships it over to them. And that’s a great place to start because she does all kinds of video and photos.
So I’m sure at this point, everybody has those in their towns and around because she’s locate I think she’s near Manchester, New Hampshire. That’s not necessarily a big place. It’s a great thing though. That’s a perfect thing. And you can find people on Instagram in your area by searching for photographers for your location, and you could get some people to help you out that way. And photos don’t have to be professional. She takes a mix there. They are professional photos, but just having somebody else do it, because it’s hard to do it all yourself, to get the perspective.
Rich: Yeah, absolutely it is.
Peg: And then you could get photos of you doing things, or your staff. And you don’t have to do it monthly, but it’s something that you could just do every once in a while.
Rich: Absolutely. So you also talk in the book about social media listening, and a great way of understanding your audience and improving through that. What are some of the steps? Because when I hear social media listening, I always think it’s more for big brands. So what does social media listening look like for a small business?
Peg: Well, there’s different ways that you can listen. One thing is you can spy on your competition. Which is nice because people are posting, you can check other things in your area. If you look at the location in Instagram, see what other people in your town are posting. Does your content fit in there? What kind of things are people talking about? Are there events in your town? Like it’s a way to find people and connect with people.
And then I also look in the comments. What kind of things are people commenting on or not commenting on? Or direct messages. Are people sending you a message all the time saying, “I can’t find your phone number on your website”, things like that. There’s that kind of social listening.
And then there’s also a lot of tools that you can use like Google alerts. I still love Google alerts. It’s free. It’s one of Google’s really only free things. No, I’m kidding. They have other stuff that’s free, but it costs you in other ways. So you can set up a Google alert for your business name or for your town and have things sent to you.
BuzzSumo is another one. That’s a paid thing, but you can set things up in there and search for people if you were looking for influencers in your area, if you wanted to play in an event, things like that.
But I like to just do the social listening by hashtags and locations, for the most part, for a small business. Because then you can see what’s going on, see if your content’s popping up, why is it? Why isn’t it? Are people using different hashtags? You have hashtag #PortlandME up behind you, maybe that’s what most people use/ Maybe there’s other ones. Maybe you’ll find new ones. Maybe everybody’s using #AmericasVacationland.
Rich: Hashtag 207 (#207) is one of my favorites, too. Because we only have one area code for the whole state.
Peg: So do we. I use #603love because it’s what people post. So it’s those kind of small finds. But then you might connect with a lot more people. So there’s a lot of different ways to listen.
Sometimes it’s listening to your competition, to what your customers are saying or asking for. Sometimes it could just be a search for whatever products you’re making or services that you have, to see what people are talking about in there. So there’s a lot of different ways to use social listening to help with finding new people, but also your own products or services to grow.
Rich: Yeah. Just a side story. So we started working with a group recently that’s looking to increase the workforce in Aroostook County, which is a very northern tip of Maine. And I found a subreddit for Aroostook, and so I just posed a question, “What do you love most and what do you hate most about Aroostook County for those who live there?” And we got 30 responses that we never would have heard from otherwise. That is a form of social listening, a little bit more engaged, perhaps than passive listing. But there’s a lot of ways that people can leverage, small businesses can leverage social media.
Peg: You were inspiring the conversation and then you listen to the responses. So, absolutely.
Rich: Yeah. So I think that there’s a lot of great information out there. And if we get back to the social part of social media, it’s just other people online trading ideas and thoughts. And it can be a very positive thing and it can be a great tool for small businesses to use to learn.
The book is called, The Art of Small Business: A Blueprint for Marketing Success. We have barely scraped the surface of all the content that’s in there. So I strongly recommend people go to Amazon right now and reserve it, or go to your local bookstore when it comes out, I believe sometime around November 19th, and be sure to go check it out.
In the meantime, Peg, for people who cannot wait, where can people connect with you online?
Peg: pegfitzpatrick.com is my website, and I’m at @PegFitzpatrick on all the different social channels. So come and say ‘hi’, and tell me that you heard me on Rich’s podcast.
Rich: Definitely do that. Peg, always a pleasure. Always love reconnecting with you. Thank you so much for coming on today.
Peg: Thanks for having me.
Show Notes:
Peg Fitzgerald helps her clients grow their businesses with social media marketing strategies that she, herself, has put to the test, and proves that you don’t always have to spend a fortune to find success. Discover more of her tips in her new book. And be sure to reach out and connect with her on Facebook and Instagram.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.