When I ask most small business owners how their social media is going, the conversation almost always ends up in the same place: they are posting content, no one is engaging with it, they are not sure it is working and they cannot quite figure out why.
Here is usually why: they are operating on one level of a four-level business social media strategy. The posting is happening. The other three levels are not.
I have worked with hundreds of businesses over 30 years, and the ones that see real results from social media are doing all four things at once. Here is what they look like.
Level 1: Your Company Accounts
This is the foundation. Your company has accounts on the platforms where your customers spend time. You are posting regularly, growing your follower count, responding to comments and spending time reading what is happening in your industry. If you are not doing this consistently, start here before anything else.
A few things that belong at this level that often get overlooked:
- A documented plan for growing followers, not just posting to the ones you have
- Scheduled time for engagement, which means commenting on other people’s posts, not just your own
- Monthly time spent listening, meaning reading what your customers and competitors are actually saying
Pull up your company’s social profiles and look at your follower count and your last ten posts. How many reactions and comments are you seeing? If you have less than 2,000 followers and/or very few points of engagement on your posts, the issue is likely that the other three levels are missing.
Level 2: Leadership Voices
This is where most small businesses have the biggest untapped opportunity.
The algorithms on every social platform, meaning the systems that decide whose content gets shown to whom, consistently favor posts from individual people over posts from company accounts. People engage more with people than with logos. This is not a small difference.
Here is a real example. Johnson and Johnson has a LinkedIn company page with 9 million followers. Their CEO has 84,000 followers. When both of them posted nearly identical content about a company acquisition, the CEO’s post got double the reactions and three times the comments.
A person with 84,000 followers outperformed a company with 9 million. That kind of result holds true at the small business level too.
What this means in practice: someone at the leadership level of your company should have an active presence on the platforms where your customers spend time. That does not mean posting every day or becoming a social media personality. It means showing up consistently, sharing genuine perspectives on your industry and engaging with the people around you.
That person might be you as the CEO. It might be your top technical leader, your head of sales or the person on your team who is most credible in your field. Whoever it is, their personal account should be part of your social media strategy, not an afterthought.
Level 3: Employee Amplification
Your employees have their own social networks. Those networks are full of potential customers, referral sources and future hires, and posts from individual employees consistently outperform company posts by significant margins. Research shows employee posts get roughly seven times more views on average than posts from the company account.
This is not about pressuring anyone to post content they are not comfortable with. It is about making it easy for the people who want to help to actually do so.
A few things that work:
- Tell new employees during onboarding which social platforms you are active on in case they want to follow you, and let them know that you occasionally ask the team to help amplify big announcements
- When you have something worth sharing, send a direct message or a quick note in your internal chat with a direct link and a simple ask so that it’s easy for them to act on
- LinkedIn has a built-in feature that lets you notify employees when you post something important – use it!
Your social media team may not be able to do this without empowerment or endorsement from you as the business owner or leadership. They may not know which employees have large networks, who is active on which platforms or what relationships exist across your company. That knowledge lives with you and your leadership team. Share it, and build the insfrastruture that is needed to support it.
Level 4: Extended Community
Think about everyone connected to your business beyond your employees and direct customers: vendors, trade associations, chambers of commerce, media contacts, complementary businesses, event partners, longtime customers who are influential in their own networks. These people have audiences too.
When your social team engages with their content, comments on their posts, tags them in relevant things your company is doing or shares what they are working on, your company has the opportunity to get in front of their followers. That is reach you are not paying for and could not easily buy.
The challenge is that your junior social media person almost certainly does not know who these people are. You do. Sit down with your team once a quarter and walk them through your most important relationships. Give them names, company names and context. That single conversation is worth more than most social media tools you could buy.
Most businesses stop at Level 1. The companies that make social media genuinely work for them have all four levels running at the same time.
Where to Start
If you are reading this and realizing your company is mostly at Level 1, do not try to fix everything at once. Pick one level and build it properly before moving to the next.
Level 2 tends to have the highest impact for the least effort. If you or another leader is not active on the social channels where your customers and prospects are hanging out, starting there is likely to move the needle faster than anything else you could do.
Start by answering these questions with your team:
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- Do we have a leader with an active personal presence on social media? If not, who should that be?
- Are we making it easy for employees to share and engage with company content?
- Have we ever mapped out our extended community and given that list to our social team?
Lara August is the Founder and CEO of Robot Creative, a marketing and branding company in San Antonio, Texas. She has worked with hundreds of small businesses over 30 years and consults, speaks and writes on marketing strategy, brand development and what it actually takes to grow a business.
