Social Media
Back in 2013/14, I was at university writing my dissertation on how small businesses could use social media marketing to help them grow.
At the time, it felt like a genuinely interesting question because social media for business was still relatively new. Plenty of small businesses weren’t using it at all and, for those that were, simply having a Facebook page and posting fairly regularly felt like you were ahead of the game.
Instagram was still mostly square photos with questionable filters, TikTok didn’t exist and short-form video certainly wasn’t part of anyone’s marketing strategy.
The idea that a local business owner might one day be expected to understand algorithms, Reels, Stories, paid social, content creation, SEO, email marketing, analytics, personal branding and AI would have sounded ridiculous.
Looking back now, I don’t think even the platforms themselves fully understood what social media was eventually going to become.
And that’s what I find so interesting.
Social media went from an opportunity to almost an expectation
When I was writing that dissertation, my argument was essentially that social media presented this huge opportunity for small businesses.
For the first time, you didn’t necessarily need a massive advertising budget to get your business in front of people. A small business could build its own audience, speak directly to customers, show some personality and create relationships with people in its local community.
It gave smaller businesses an opportunity to compete for attention in spaces that had previously been much easier for businesses with bigger marketing budgets to dominate.
That part hasn’t really changed. If anything, the opportunity is bigger than ever.
What has changed is just how much is expected of businesses if they want to take advantage of it.
Today, we’re asking small business owners to run their business while somehow also becoming content creators, videographers, editors, copywriters and digital marketers. They’re expected to understand what their analytics are telling them, how to get found on Google, what makes a good Reel, how email marketing works and which of the latest platform updates they actually need to care about.
And just as they feel like they’ve finally got their head around something, the platform changes it again.
Somewhere along the way, marketing became everyone’s job
This is probably one of the biggest changes I’ve noticed.
Digital marketing used to feel like something businesses could choose to explore. Now, whether you employ a full marketing team or you’re running the whole business from your kitchen table, there’s an expectation that your business will have some kind of digital presence.
Customers Google you before they contact you. They’ll look at your Instagram before they visit. They’ll read your reviews, watch your videos, check your website and potentially follow you for six months before they ever buy anything.
Your digital presence has become part of the customer experience.
And that creates a really interesting challenge for smaller businesses because, while the opportunities have grown enormously, so has the workload that comes with them.
I also think we’ve made marketing sound far more complicated than it needs to be
This is something I feel quite strongly about.
There is so much marketing advice available now that I completely understand why businesses find it overwhelming.
Open Instagram and someone will tell you exactly what time you need to post. Scroll down and somebody else is telling you posting times don’t matter anymore. One person says hashtags are dead, another gives you the exact number you apparently need to use. We’re told to create more video, optimise everything for search, jump on trends, use AI, embrace automation… while simultaneously being told our content needs to feel more human and authentic than ever.
It’s a lot.
And when you’re already trying to actually run a business, figuring out which piece of advice you should listen to can become a job in itself.
The funny thing is that underneath all of those updates, trends and new platforms, the fundamentals I was writing about back in 2013 haven’t really disappeared.
Good marketing is still about understanding who you’re talking to, creating something they’ll find useful or interesting and giving people a reason to trust you. It’s about staying visible, building relationships and making it easy for someone to take that next step when they’re ready.
The tools we use to do those things have changed dramatically.
Human behaviour hasn’t changed quite as much.
The biggest shift for me has been from access to support
Back then, small businesses needed convincing that digital marketing was worth doing.
Now? Most businesses we speak to already know they should be doing it.
That’s rarely the problem.
What we hear much more often is that they know they need to be more consistent, but they’re not sure what to post. They’re doing lots of different things but don’t really know what’s working. They might have one person looking after their marketing who is somehow expected to be an expert in social media, content, SEO, email, paid advertising and everything else that comes with it.
Or, something I think most of us can relate to, they’ve got plenty of ideas but actually finding the time and headspace to make them happen is another story altogether.
And that’s why I think the challenge has changed.
We don’t have a lack of marketing information anymore. If anything, we have too much of it.
The problem is knowing which bits matter to your business and what you should actually do with them.
I think marketing support has to evolve to reflect that.
Which brings me to The Coaching Club
It’s actually quite surreal to think that more than a decade after writing about how small businesses could use social media to grow, I’m now part of a team building something specifically designed to help them do exactly that.
Just in a very different digital world.
The Coaching Club has come from years of working with businesses through The Social Co Academy and repeatedly seeing that gap between knowing what to do and actually being able to put it into practice.
It’s not about taking someone’s marketing away from them. And it’s not another course where we give you loads of information and then send you away to figure out how it applies to your business.
It’s about having experienced marketers in your corner.
That might mean having someone to bounce an idea off when you’ve been staring at it for far too long, getting some direction when you’re not sure what to prioritise or simply having another pair of eyes on something before it goes live.
And because The Social Co Academy sits within a working marketing agency, that support isn’t limited to one area of marketing. We have people working across content, paid social, SEO, PPC, design and strategy every day, with real businesses and real campaigns.
In many ways, it feels like the natural evolution of the question I was asking back in 2013.
Back then I wanted to understand how small businesses could use social media to grow.
Now, I think the more interesting question is how we make sure those same businesses have the knowledge, confidence and support to keep up with everything digital marketing has become.
I have absolutely no idea what social media will look like another 12 years from now and, if the last 12 are anything to go by, I’m not even going to attempt that prediction.
But I do think one thing will stay the same.
The businesses that understand their customers, communicate like humans, build genuine relationships and are willing to keep learning will always have an advantage.
The platforms, algorithms and tools will continue to change, but good marketing will still be good marketing.
And after watching this industry evolve for more than a decade, that’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve learnt.
