Social Marketing, Micro Businesses and My Confession

Ever heard of Warren Knight? If you have, you are probably succeeding with your social marketing goals and have an efficient and regular system in place to get messages out across numerous platforms in order to grow your brand or product.

I, on the other hand hadn’t come across this social media speaker, author and trainer until I attended one of his seminars at Top Drawer in London yesterday. But that’s not surprising as I am fully aware that my social marketing falls woefully under most radars. I am also acutely aware that I need to improve things on this front but unfortunately fall into the camp of – and this is where it feels like a horrible confession, apart from instagram , I really don’t enjoy taking part, in fact I will go one step further and say it very often makes me feel sad. There, I said it, a faux pas extraordinaire, just like that. Warren will not approve.

However, one thing I am not doing here is knocking it. I’m not that dim, I know it works supremely well, and that many millions of people learn fantastic things, meet like minded people and indeed one of my closest friends is a meteoric star on it. Plus it’s probably near impossible to succeed with a product without it. All I am saying is that I can’t get fully into it. But I do try.

So the very engaging and focused Warren managed to tap into my guilty secret and instead of letting it fester, today I am facing it head on by allowing myself to confess, I’m not that good at it but at least I’m not in denial, surely in that case I’m firmly on the road to recovery?

Then as if by magic, Craft Scotland who had kindly invited me on this ‘Go and See’ trip to London introduced me to Piyush Suri. Piyush is one of these enviable people who has that ‘tigger bounce’ (a term used in an article in yesterdays Evening Standard about people who simply have great mitochondrion and are naturally energetic powerhouses – it went on to suggest ways to improve your own ‘tigger bounce’) and apart from directing massive events like Top Drawer, also has his own homewares brand Akin and Suri , textile company and is Director of Hand Made in Britain . On meeting Piyush, you quickly learn that he must have teams. People to help grow his business. It’s difficult for micro businesses to imagine employing staff but until you understand your own strengths (and weaknesses) and realise that you may need to employ others (and indeed should) with a different skill set, it’s not really possible to grow properly.

Shortly afterwards, I met a jeweller and she told me that she didn’t enjoy social marketing either but was savvy enough to know how crucial it was for her company. So she employs someone for a few hours a week to do her social marketing for her. This has meant she can concentrate on what she is good at – making fabulous jewellery.

So this is a long way of saying, make sure you have great social marketing (thanks Warren for underlining this for me and I hope you are pleased that I’m using plenty of links 😉 ) but if you do find it chips away at you or destroys your creativity then don’t bother doing it because if you aren’t fully engaged it’s actually a bit of a waste of time.  It’s like anything, if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well . So try and find a way of delegating, it will probably help your business grow. As much as we all try we can’t do everything all of the time – although I should add that according to Warren one weeks worth of effective, timed, social marketing can actually be achieved with one hours work…but he didn’t tell us how to do that, I guess it’s in his book…

However, in the meantime, you can still find me dabbling on Twitter, Facebook  Pinterest and Instagram 😉

Do you enjoy taking part in social media? How much time do you spend on it? 

…I can’t have a post without some images so here are some pictures (no filters) of the amazing winter sky we have had recently taken from my kitchen window. And on that note, I’m off to do something I love, design some textile prints.